❉✉r❤❛♠ ❊✲❚❤❡s❡s
❚❤❡ P❡rs✐st❡♥❝❡ ♦❢ ▼✐♥✐♠❛❧✐s♠
❇❖❚❍❆✱ ▼❆❘❈✱❏❖❍❆◆◆
❍♦✇ t♦ ❝✐t❡✿
❇❖❚❍❆✱ ▼❆❘❈✱❏❖❍❆◆◆ ✭✷✵✶✶✮
❚❤❡ P❡rs✐st❡♥❝❡ ♦❢ ▼✐♥✐♠❛❧✐s♠✱ ❉✉r❤❛♠ t❤❡s❡s✱ ❉✉r❤❛♠ ❯♥✐✈❡rs✐t②✳
❆✈❛✐❧❛❜❧❡ ❛t ❉✉r❤❛♠ ❊✲❚❤❡s❡s ❖♥❧✐♥❡✿ ❤tt♣✿✴✴❡t❤❡s❡s✳❞✉r✳❛❝✳✉❦✴✹✹✺✺✴
❯s❡ ♣♦❧✐❝②
❚❤❡ ❢✉❧❧✲t❡①t ♠❛② ❜❡ ✉s❡❞ ❛♥❞✴♦r r❡♣r♦❞✉❝❡❞✱ ❛♥❞ ❣✐✈❡♥ t♦ t❤✐r❞ ♣❛rt✐❡s ✐♥ ❛♥② ❢♦r♠❛t ♦r ♠❡❞✐✉♠✱ ✇✐t❤♦✉t ♣r✐♦r ♣❡r♠✐ss✐♦♥ ♦r
❝❤❛r❣❡✱ ❢♦r ♣❡rs♦♥❛❧ r❡s❡❛r❝❤ ♦r st✉❞②✱ ❡❞✉❝❛t✐♦♥❛❧✱ ♦r ♥♦t✲❢♦r✲♣r♦✜t ♣✉r♣♦s❡s ♣r♦✈✐❞❡❞ t❤❛t✿
•
❛ ❢✉❧❧ ❜✐❜❧✐♦❣r❛♣❤✐❝ r❡❢❡r❡♥❝❡ ✐s ♠❛❞❡ t♦ t❤❡ ♦r✐❣✐♥❛❧ s♦✉r❝❡
•
❛ ❧✐♥❦ ✐s ♠❛❞❡ t♦ t❤❡ ♠❡t❛❞❛t❛ r❡❝♦r❞ ✐♥ ❉✉r❤❛♠ ❊✲❚❤❡s❡s
•
t❤❡ ❢✉❧❧✲t❡①t ✐s ♥♦t ❝❤❛♥❣❡❞ ✐♥ ❛♥② ✇❛②
❚❤❡ ❢✉❧❧✲t❡①t ♠✉st ♥♦t ❜❡ s♦❧❞ ✐♥ ❛♥② ❢♦r♠❛t ♦r ♠❡❞✐✉♠ ✇✐t❤♦✉t t❤❡ ❢♦r♠❛❧ ♣❡r♠✐ss✐♦♥ ♦❢ t❤❡ ❝♦♣②r✐❣❤t ❤♦❧❞❡rs✳
P❧❡❛s❡ ❝♦♥s✉❧t t❤❡ ❢✉❧❧ ❉✉r❤❛♠ ❊✲❚❤❡s❡s ♣♦❧✐❝② ❢♦r ❢✉rt❤❡r ❞❡t❛✐❧s✳
❆❝❛❞❡♠✐❝ ❙✉♣♣♦rt ❖✣❝❡✱ ❉✉r❤❛♠ ❯♥✐✈❡rs✐t②✱ ❯♥✐✈❡rs✐t② ❖✣❝❡✱ ❖❧❞ ❊❧✈❡t✱ ❉✉r❤❛♠ ❉❍✶ ✸❍P
❡✲♠❛✐❧✿ ❡✲t❤❡s❡s✳❛❞♠✐♥❅❞✉r✳❛❝✳✉❦ ❚❡❧✿ ✰✹✹ ✵✶✾✶ ✸✸✹ ✻✶✵✼
❤tt♣✿✴✴❡t❤❡s❡s✳❞✉r✳❛❝✳✉❦
1
THE PERSISTENCE OF MINIMALISM
MARC JOHANN BOTHA
Ph.D.
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH STUDIES
DURHAM UNIVERSITY
2011
2
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
6
List of Sound Examples
9
List of Video Examples
10
List of Abbreviations
10
Acknowledgements
12
PART ONE – MINIMALISM AS DYNAMIC MOVEMENT
1. INTRODUCTION
a) Principal thesis and structural overview
14
b) Sub-theses in support of the principal thesis
18
2. MINIMALISM AS A DYNAMIC AESTHETIC MOVEMENT
a) Minimalism as an existential modality
19
b) The tension between stasis and dynamis in the concept of an aesthetic movement
20
c) Naming minimalism
23
3. THE EMERGENCE OF MINIMALISM
a) A path of austerity towards clarity
28
b) The minimalist transection of modern and postmodern
44
c) Institution and economy
48
4. THE AESTHETICS AND OBJECTS OF MINIMALISM
a) Formalism and objecthood
55
b) Minimal forms and internal relation
60
c) Poietic immanence – impassive presence, repetition, and the demands minimalism
makes of its perceiver
68
3
d) Minimalism between index and indifference – nonreferentiality, nonmediation,
nonanthropomorphism
73
e) The problem of reduction and the questions of facture and process
83
5. A MINIMALIST TOPOLOGY OF THE REAL
a) The pursuit of the Real as a transection of Being and existence
90
b) Species of realism
91
c) Clarifying the Real
97
d) Returning to the principles of ontological realism
102
e) A topology of the Real
106
f) The persistence of the Real
111
g) The facticity of the Real
114
h) A minimalist realism
118
PART TWO – MINIMALISM AS QUANTITATIVE ONTOLOGY
6. MINIMALISM AS QUANTITATIVE BEING
a) Counting and the experience of existence
122
b) The loss of quantity and the ascendency of quality in the understanding of ontology
126
c) Sustenance and silence
127
d) Autotelism
131
e) Modular process as sonic quantity
135
7. THE QUALIFICATION OF QUANTITY
a) The refusal of quantity
145
b) The One and the persistence of the universal
149
c) One and Multiple
152
8. THE COUNT
a) The subtraction of novelty
166
b) Configuring the Count
171
4
9. MINIMALISM OF NEGATION AND THE TAKING PLACE OF QUANTITY
a) Minimalist negation made manifest
178
b) Negation, sublation and lessness
184
c) Taking-place
197
10. THE TENSION OF NOTHINGNESS AND MINIMUM
a) Nihilism and an approach to minimum
202
b) Nothingness and existence
207
c) The minimal presentation of nothingness
220
d) Aesthetic facticity – disappearance and persistence
230
e) The argument regarding minimalism and perception
241
f) Minimal intensity and existential appearance
253
PART THREE – MINIMALISM AS EXISTENTIAL TRANSUMPTION
11. THEORETICAL OBJECTHOOD
a) Objects in search of a theory
255
b) The gains and risks of meta-theory
257
12. CONCRETE VISUAL ATOPIAS
a) Preamble regarding minimalism and concretism
262
b) The visible traces of theurgical poiesis
263
c) Locating the atopia of poetry
271
d) Futurism and the poignancy of direction
283
e) An event between art and non-art
297
13. SONIC OBJECTS AS MINIMALIST POETRY
a) Solid sounds
309
b) Intermediation as generic expression
315
c) Homonymy, homophony and solidity
318
d) Losing voice and concrete intensification
327
e) The technology of solid sounds
334
5
14. CONCRETISM AS AN EXEMPLARY VEHICLE FOR MINIMALISM
a) A concrete continuum
339
b) The parameters of concretism
348
c) Synaesthetic concrete patterning
349
d) Quantitative categories and the role of the example
357
e) The example is para-ontological rather than para-epistemological
361
f) Exemplary force
365
g) Concretism as minimalist para-ontology
367
15. A TYPOLOGY OF MINIMALISM
a) Transumption and the typology of minimalism
369
b) The minimalist logic of containment
371
c) The minimalist logic of distension
381
d) The minimalist logic of distribution
390
16. BIBLIOGRAPHY
a) Primary sources
309
b) Secondary sources
406
6
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1: El Greco, Saint Francis Praying, 1580-85
Figure 2: The cell of St. Theresa of Avilla, Spain
Figure 3: Nelson Mandela's Prison Cell on Robben Island
Figure 4: Martin Boyce, Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the
Birth, 2003/2008
Figure 5: Dan Flavin, Monument 1 for V. Tatlin, 1964
Figure 6: Robert Morris, Untitled (Quarter-Round Mesh), 1967
Figure 7: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965
Figure 8: Martin Boyce, Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the
Birth, 2003/2008. Installation view
Figure 9: Martin Boyce, Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun. the Tress and the
Birth, 2003/2008. Installation view
Figure 10: Great Stone Dwelling House, Enfield Village, New Hampshire, 1837-41
Figure 11: Shaker kitchen and furniture, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, undated
Figure 12: Shaker wall with built-in cupboards, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, undated
Figure 13: Ivan Zvesdin, School 518, 1935
Figure 14: Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau, 1924-5
Figure 15:Gerrit Rietveld, Zig-zag Chair, 1934
Figure 16: Donald Judd, Chair 84/85, 1991
Figure 17: Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1997
Figure 18: Agnes Martin, Untitled #9, 1990
Figure 19: Dirk Jan Postel, Glass House in Almelo
Figure 20: Morger & Degelo, House in Dornach
Figure 21: Gluckman Mayner, Helmut Lang Flagship Parfumerie, New York, 1997
Figure 22: Francisco Costa (for Calvin Klein), Pre-fall, 2011/12
Figure 23: Carl Andre, Fall, 1968
Figure 24: Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974
Figure 25: Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park, 1959
Figure 26: Barnett Newman, cathedra, 1971
Figure 27: Yves Klein, IKB 82, 1959
Figure 28: Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon 1958
Figure 29: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting Black (A), 1954-9
Figure 30: Brice Marden, Grove Group I, 1972-3
Figure 31: Frank Stella, Delaware Crossing, 1961
Figure 32: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1970
Figure 33: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1990; first type 1965
Figure 34: Aram Saroyan, Untitled poster-poem, 1965-6
Figure 35: Heinz Gappmayr, ver, 1966
Figure 36: Robert Wilson, Part of stage design for Einstein on the Beach, 1976
Figure 37: Dan Flavin, untitled (to Robert, Joe and Michael) 1975-81
Figure 38: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003
30
32
32
33
34
34
34
35
35
37
38
38
39
39
40
40
43
43
53
53
54
54
56
56
58
58
59
59
59
61
62
62
62
64
64
70
71
71
7
Figure 39: Walter de Maria, The Lighting Field, 1971-7
Figure 40: Ian Hamilton Finlay with Alexander Stoddart, Apollon Terroriste, 1988
Figure 41: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Apollo/Saint-Just (after Bernini), 1986
Figure 42: Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Garden Temple (To Apollo, His Music, His Missiles,
His Muses), 1982
Figure 43: Sol LeWitt, Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD), 1966
Figure 44: Donald Judd, Untitled series, 1982-6
Figure 45: Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum IV, 1967
Figure 46: Paul Mogensen, Copperopolis, 1966
Figure 47: Steve McCaffery, from Panopticon, 1984
Figure 48: Ronald Bladen, The X, 1967
Figure 49: Robert Mangold, Red Wall, 1965
Figure 50: Topology of the Real with Respect to Being, event and occurrence of entities
Figure 51: Sol LeWitt, HRZL, 1990
Figure 52: Sol Le Witt, 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1978
Figure 53: Don Eddy, Private Parking V, 1971
Figure 54: Robert Morris, Untitled (Battered Cubes), 1966
Figure 55: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962
Figure 56: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962; three different exposures of contrast
and brightness juxtaposed
Figure 57: Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965
Figure 58: Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959
Figure 59: Kenneth Noland, Turnsole, 1961
Figure 60: Dan Flavin, the nominalist three (to William of Ockham), 1964
Figure 61: Eric Andersen, I Have Confidence in You, 1965
Figure 62: Ad Reinhardt, Study for a Painting, 1938
Figure 63: Ad Reinhardt, Collage, 1950
Figure 64: Ad Reinhardt, Number 107, 1950
Figure 65: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (Red), 1952
Figure 66: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1957
Figure 67: Bruce Nauman, No, No, New Museum, 1987
Figure 68: Carl Andre, Cedar Piece. 1959, reconstructed 1964
Figure 69: Richard Serra, Splashing, 1968
Figure 70: Hansjörg Mayer, from fortführungen, 1964
Figure 71: Heinz Gappmayr, Untitled, 1964
Figure 72: Cy Twombly, Cold Stream, 1966
Figure 73: Cy Twombly, Arcadia, 1958
Figure 74: Still from opening of A Zed and Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway, 1985
Figure 75: Sequence of two stills from opening of A Zed and Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway,
1985
Figure 76: Sequence of stills from Peter Greenaway, A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985
Figure 77: Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1965-7
Figure 78: Dan Flavin - untitled (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), 1996. Interior view
71
74
76
76
77
78
78
78
81
85
86
107
140
140
141
162
163
164
164
165
165
173
177
182
182
183
183
183
187
195
196
197
197
218
219
238
239
240
248
250
8
Figure 79: Dan Flavin - untitled (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), 1996. Exterior view
Figure 80: Simias of Rhodes, Egg calligram, 3rd century BC
Figure 81: Amuletic tughra, Iran, Date unspecified
Figure 82: Hanuman Calligram, Sanskrit, 19th century. Edition of Ramayana
Figure 83: Massoeretic Text, Hebrew, 14th century. British Museum, London
Figure 84: George Herbert, The Altar, 1633
Figure 85: Stéphane Mallarmé, A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (70-1)
Figure 86: Stéphane Mallarmé, A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (58-9)
Figure 87: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966
Figure 88: Samuel Beckett, Quad (still from colour version), 1981
Figure 89: Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Ward Jackson, an old friend and colleague who,
when, during Fall, 1957, I finally returned to New York from Washington, and joined
him to work together in this museum, kindly communicated), 1971
Figure 90: Premiere performance by Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild of Philip Glass‟ Strung Out,
November 1968, New York
Figure 91: Guillaume Apollinaire, Horse Calligram, 1918
Figure 92: Guillaume Apollinaire, Lettres-Océan, 1918
Figure 93: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, After the Battle of the Marne, Joffre toured the front
by car, 1914
Figure 94: Raoul Hausmann, Material for Painting, Sculpture, Architecture 1918, 1918
Figure 95: Francis Picabia, Poéme banal, 1918
Figure 96: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
Figure 97: John Cage, Empty Words, 1980
Figure 98: Eugen Gomringer, wind, 1954
Figure 99: Augusto de Campos, terremoto, 1957
Figure 100: Ronaldo Azeredo, Velocidade, 1957
Figure 101:Seiichi Nīkuni, Ame/Rain, 1966
Figure 102: Robert Lax, Red & Blue, 1967
Figure 103: Robert Lax, Another Red Red Blue Poem, 1971
Figure 104: Emmett Williams, like attracts like, 1958
Figure 105: Frans Vanderlinde, Elimination/Incarnation, Date unspecified
Figure 106: Jo Baer, Stations of the Spectrum (Primary), 1967-9
Figure 107: Brice Marden, Grove Group II, 1973
Figure 108: Brice Marden, Grove Group (1-5), 1972
Figure 109: Liliane Lijn, ABC Cone, 1965
Figure 110: Liliane Lijn, Act as Atom, 1966
Figure 111: Dan Flavin, untitled (to Tracy, to celebrate the love of a lifetime), 1992
Figure 112: Dan Flavin, untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b, 1978
Figure 113: untitled (Marfa Project), 1996
Figure 114: Installation views of Dan Flavin, untitled (Marfa project), 1996.
Figure 115: Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future,
Saint-Just, 1983
250
267
267
267
267
269
273
276
286
287
288
288
291
293
295
301
301
303
333
341
341
345
345
351
355
373
373
375
376
377
384
384
393
393
396
396
398
9
LIST OF AUDIO EXAMPLES
Track 1. Steve Reich, Tehillim, 1981. ECM, 1981
Track 2. Arvo Pärt, Miserere. ECM, 1990
Track 3. John Tavener, “The Ways to Salvation,” Mary of Egypt: An Opera. Collins, 1992
Track 4. Marnie Stern, “Steely,” This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That
and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That. Kill Rock Starts, 2008
Track 5. Plastikman, “Psyk,” Artifakts. Novamute, 1998
Track 6. La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano, 1964-present
Track 7. Steve Reich, Four Organs. Nonesuch, 1996
Track 8. Philip Glass, “Rubric,” Glassworks. CBS, 1982
Track 9. Steve Reich, Pendulum Music, 1973
Track 10. Yves Klein, Monotone Symphony, 1949
Track 11. Erik Satie, Vexations, 1893-5
Track 12. Philip Glass, Two Pages, 1969
Track 13. Terry Riley, In C. CBS, 1968
Track 14. Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians. ECM, 1978
Track 15. Philip Glass, “Knee-Play 1,” Einstein on the Beach. Nonesuch, 1993
Track 16. Nico Muhly, “Archive,” Mothertongue. Bedroom Community, 2008
Track 17. Nico Muhly, “Monster,” Mothertongue. Bedroom Community, 2008
Track 18. Bruce Nauman, Pete and Repeat/It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, 1987/2004
Track 19. Bruce Nauman, No No, New Museum, 1987. Private Collection
Track 20. Meredith Monk, “Arctic Bar,” Facing North. ECM, 1992
Track 21. Isidore Isou, “Improvisation,” Poemes Lettristes 1944-1999
Track 22. Michael Nyman, “Time Lapse,” The Essential Michael Nyman Band. Argo, 1992
Track 23. Philip Glass, “Floe,” Glassworks. CBS, 1982
Track 24. Antonio Vivaldi, “Allegro,” Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8/RV 269, 1725
Track 25. Philip Glass, “Knee-Play 2,” Einstein on the Beach. Nonesuch, 1993
Track 26. Anonymous, “First Delphic Hymn to Apollo,” Musique de la Grèce Antique.
Harmonia Mundi, 1979
Track 27. Terence, “Hecyra,” Musique de la Grèce Antique. Harmonia Mundi, 1979
Track 28. Ensemble Organum, “Domine quinque taelta,” Saint Marcel Mass, Old Roman
Chant. Harmonia Mundi, 1992
Track 29. Ensemble Organum, “Qui venit ad me non esuriet,” Mozarabic Chant,
Cathedral of Toledo. Harmonia Mundi, 1995
Track 30. Muhammad Hassan, “Surat Al-Fatihah,” Holy Qur’an
Track 31. Monks of Thami Monastery, “Phyag‟chal-ba,” Tibet: Musiques Sacrées, Ocora,
1987
Track 32. Taimbault de Vaqueiras, “Kalenda Maya,” The Dante Troubadours. Nimbus, 1997
Track 33. Claudio Monteverdi, “In question lieto,” Orfeo. Erato, 1986
Track 34. John Adams, “The people are the heroes now,” Nixon in China. Nonesuch, 1988
Track 35. Louis Andriessen, “Part I,” De Materie. Nonesuch, 1996
Track 36. Alexey Kruchenykh, Ballad of the Dancer, 1951
42
42
42
53
53
72
72
77
87
129
135
135
135
172
173
175
175
186
186
210
216
241
241
242
242
312
312
313
313
313
313
314
315
316
318
319
10
Track 37. Alexey Kruchenykh, zok zok zok. Sound source undated
Track 38. Velimir Khlebnikov, Incantation by Laughter, 1908-9
Track 39. Raoul Hausmann, K’Perioum, 1918
Track 40. Kurt Schwitters, “Scherzo and Trio,” Ursonate, 1922-32
Track 41. John Cage, Empty Words. Wergo, 1991
Track 42. Henri Chopin, Espaces et Gestes, 1950
Track 43. Jaap Blonk, Zamongi Grin, 1998
Track 44. Fischerspooner, “Emerge,” #1. Capitol, 2001
Track 45. Paul Lansky, “Idle Chatter,” More Than Idle Chatter. Bridge, 1994
Track 46. Steve Reich, “Come Out,” Early Works. Nonesuch, 1987
Track 47. Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room. Lovely Music, 1990
Track 48. Rhys Chatham, A Crimson Grail. Table of Elements, 2007
Track 49. Morton Feldman, Vertical Thoughts 1, 1963
Track 50. Steve Reich, “Before the War,” Different Trains. Nonesuch, 1988
319
320
326
327
328
335
335
337
337
340
367
372
372
390
LIST OF VIDEO EXAMPLES
Clip 1. Bruce Nauman, No No, New Museum, 1987
Clip 2. Peter Greenaway, “Surgery scene,” A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985
Clip 3. Peter Greenaway, “Time-lapse lab scene,” A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985
Clip 4. Liliane Lijn, ABC Cone, 1965
Clip 5. Liliane Lijn, Act as Atom, 1966
186
237
237
384
385
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ACP
AF
AGM
BE
BN
CC
CDW
CG
CPIA
CRAC
CSP
DS
DSCMA
EE
Emmett Williams, ed., An Anthology of Concrete Poetry
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
M.L. West, Ancient Greek Music
Alain Badiou, Being and Event
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works
John Cage, Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz
Stephen Bann, ed., Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology
Eugene Wildman, ed., The Chicago Review Anthology of Concrete Poetry
Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose
Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism
Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism,” Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents
11
EVC
GO
HS
IH
IRB
LD
LRD
MA
MAP
MFMR
MP
NN
PMV1
PP
SE
SMP
SP/PS
SRB
SRH
SRM
TO
TW
K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker, eds., Experimental – Visual –
Concrete
Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus (book)
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History
Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous To Be?, ed. Jill Robbins
Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death
Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death
Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology
James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties
Kim A. Herzinger, ed., Minimalist Fiction, special issue of Mississippi Review
Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy
Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, Poems for the Millennium, Volume 1
Maurice Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy
Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, eds., The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of
Sound
Ray Brassier, contribution to “Speculative Realism,” Collapse III
Graham Harman, contribution to “Speculative Realism,” Collapse III
Quentin Meillassoux, contribution to “Speculative Realism,” Collapse III
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other
Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano
12
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My heartfelt and enduring gratitude goes to my supervisor, Patricia Waugh, whose remarkable and
inspiring intellect is equalled only by the depth of her humanity. Through her example I come to
understand what it means to defend the honour of thinking.
Special thanks is due to my father, Neville, whose unconditional support, and editorial expertise, have
been invaluable. I cannot adequately hope to convey the depth of my appreciation. For the care and
patience of the rest of my family – my mother, Annette, and Andrea, Jake, Helen and Olivia – my loving
gratitude, as also to my aunts Lorraine and Yvonne and my godfather Walter.
Finally my thanks to the many people who have offered their advice, criticism and assistance: especially
to Maebh Long and Heather Yeung – for their unconditional friendship, encouragement and stimulating
dialogue; also to Stephen Bann, Timothy Clark, Alec Finlay, Ulrike Kistner, Liliane Lijn, Ulrika Maude,
Nico Muhly, Reingard Nethersole, Stuart Sim, Samuel Thomas, and Andries Wessels, and to the
numerous interlocutors and friends from various conferences, symposia, lectures, reading-groups, and
publications with whom I have had the privilege of corresponding, formally and informally. To the
following organizations, and the individuals associated with them, my thanks also: Durham University,
for the grant of the Durham Doctoral Fellowship which made this study possible, Little Sparta Trust,
Ingleby Gallery, and Timothy Taylor Gallery.
The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published
without the prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged.
13
Entia non sunt multiplicande praetor necessitate
(Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity)
– attributed to William of Ockham (1287-1347)
14
PART ONE: MINIMALISM AS DYNAMIC MOVEMENT
1. INTRODUCTION
a) Principal thesis and structural overview
The thesis of the present work is that minimalism exemplifies the facticity and persistence of the Real.
Grounding this assertion is the fundamental distinction between Being1 or pure multiplicity, and
existence, which involves the subtraction of contingent unities from such multiplicity without reducing
the latter.2 Accepting this distinction, it becomes possible to recognize that, from both an ontological and
an existential perspective, minimalism discovers distinctive articulations. From the perspective of
ontology, minimalism expresses its poietic in the terms of quantity – a quantity from which are drawn its
existential qualities. From an existential perspective, minimalism emerges by a logic of transumption – “a
poetics involving transference from one part or place to another, and marking that transference in a
material way.”3
In the case of minimalism, this transumption is from the material place of the work to its poietic takingplace.4 If this taking-place manifests in terms of a radical reconsideration of the spatial and temporal
aspects of objecthood, its principal predication is atopian – the manifestation of a poietic non-space upon
which the rehearsal of generativity itself is maximally visible. Such minimalist transumption manifests in
three principal ways: in terms of containment or convergence, in which the restriction or unification of
properties defines the parameters of the work; distension, which results from the redefinition of
minimalist materialism in terms of process; and distribution, which is marked by the transformation of the
1
Here the upper-case Being is used to designate the ontological field as a whole – that which Badiou refers to as
being qua being – whereas the lower-case being is more or less co-extensive with existents – those things which are
subtracted from pure Being and which Badiou refers to in terms of being qua existence. The preference of specific
writers has been followed for the most part – Badiou‟s being qua being and being qua existence, and Agamben‟s
whatever being foremost amongst these.
2
Alain Badiou, “The Question of Being Today,” Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto
Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 46-8. Collection hereafter TW.
3
Stephen Bann, “A Poetics of Transumption,” Cosmopoetics, St. John‟s College, Durham University, 8 September
2010.
4
The significance of the term taking-place is explained below.
15
constituent medium of the work or its exposition qua medium. In this context, the Real reaches across the
ontological and the existential in order to clarify the relation between these two.
The discussion investigates these claims in three parts. The first part, including the present introductory
section, offers a brief overview of the argument and its structure by presenting the primary thesis upon
which the argument hinges (stated above), then laying out a number of sub-theses required to confirm and
demonstrate the validity of the thesis. The opening section includes concise accounts of the two terms at
the heart of this thesis: minimalism and the Real.
Regarding minimalism, a brief examination is offered of that which is delimited by this term. Minimalism
offers a dynamic field upon which to reappraise the notion of an aesthetic5 movement. Rapidly tracing its
origins, development and criticism from several distinct perspectives, the introductory account argues that
minimalism identifies itself by a peculiar reflexivity, at once concerned with the formal – indeed formalist
– aspects of its emergence, and the ontological and existential material from which its objects take their
shape. These ontological and existential modalities by which minimalism is recognized – quantity and
transumption – are inextricable from a type of realism, neither naive nor dogmatic, which is marked by
the actual taking-place6 of entities. Briefly, such taking-place recognizes that “the pure transcendent is the
taking-place of every thing...[B]eing irreparably in the world is what transcends and exposes every
worldly entity.”7 In its taking-place the facticity of minimalism is also defined. The Real, in turn, names
the quantitative ontological ground to which minimalism attests: that which is Real conjoins the
contingency of every entity in any existential situation and the irreversible temporal passage within which
such entities manifest; what is Real is a contingent entity taking-place in time.
The second section explores the quantitative ontology by which minimalism expresses itself in relation to
the Real. Challenging the predominantly qualitative understanding of phenomena, the argument takes its
initial direction from the manner in which minimalist aesthetic objects reflect the quantitative basis of
Being, exemplifying the ateleological immanence of their own taking-place. Illustrated by diverse
examples, minimalist art renders maximally visible this quantitative dimension of Being and its relation to
5
The terms art and aesthetic are employed in their broadest sense in the following work. Art is used to encompass
all creative disciplines – their objects, properties and processes – irrespective of the medium or media through which
they are expressed. Similarly, the term aesthetic is used in relation to art, and so, unless otherwise specified, is
applied in its broadest sense.
6
Taking-place – a central term in the following study – is developed from the commentary of Giorgio Agamben on
the philosophy of Amalric of Bena, and is discussed in some detail subsequently (Giorgio Agamben, The Coming
Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 13-5. Hereafter CC.
7
CC, 15.
16
ontological realism. To claim that minimalism is primarily concerned with an exposition of quantity is not
to deny that its objects have qualities, or that these qualities lack significance or meaning. Rather, the
possibility of the latter is predicated on the coherence of the former. Returning to the Parmenidean axiom
of the One and the Multiple as the point of departure for any ontology, the present work favours the view,
elaborated by Alain Badiou, that Being is multiple. Upon this understanding, every existential situation in
which a Real entity is subtracted from pure multiplicity, involves a process by which multiplicity is
counted-as-One.8 Minimalism clarifies in its objects both the Count and the Real – the contingent stability
and the contingent taking-place of entities. The tension between contingency and stability is reflected in
the manner in which minimalism embraces simultaneously an aesthetic of eschewal and negation, and one
of production or poiesis. Regarding the former, minimalism offers a potent account of the sublation – a
lessness which, pressed further towards the Void, touches the very heart of the questions of death,
disappearance and nothingness.
Closely tracing the negative aspect of minimalism paradoxically returns us to the positivity of process: a
poietic – that is, productive – impasse between the minimalist object on the one hand as absolutely
independent and on the other as the product of perception. To examine this problem, the discussion traces
the several intersection of the trajectories of nihilism, existentialism and the minimalist aesthetic. In
particular, it sets about re-examining Levinas‟ proposition of the il y a – an important ontological precept
which is habitually misinterpreted or oversimplified – as the negative approximation of the Real.
Negation and the philosophical discourse on nothingness finally point back to the sheer facticity of the
Real to which minimalism attests.
Having established that the ontological modality of minimalism is quantitative, and briefly evaluated the
claims of pure quantity against those of a qualitative phenomenology, the third section turns with greater
vigour to the manner in which minimalism manifests in existential terms by a logic of transumption – the
subtraction of poietic force from pure quantity, so that it might be predicated in aesthetic terms. That such
transumption is exemplified with particular clarity by minimalism and its objects is a central tenet of the
argument. Minimalism, in fact, constitutes an aesthetic field occupied by theoretical objects – objects in
search of a theory, one might say, which by their very taking-place obviate any simple distinction of
theory from praxis by posing at their heart a question of considerable significance to the present study:
can a theory of minimalism confirm the sheer facticity of its taking-place solely by the instantiation of its
8
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 23. Hereafter
BE. When One is presented in the upper-case it is to identify the function of ontological unicity from the
commonplace numerical use.
17
objects? In fact, minimalism effects a curious tension between its objects, their theoretical constitution,
and a meta-theoretical understanding of the force of poietic instantiation itself. The present study suggests
that this tension is explicable in terms of the aesthetic of concretism.
Concretism is examined as a transhistorical9 and transmediary phenomenon – at many points parallel in
emphasis yet distinct from minimalism; at others, furnishing minimalism with of its most significant
examples. From its theurgical origins in the visual and sonic genres and forms of classical antiquity,
through to its extensive presence in the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century – Futurism,
Dadaism, Concrete poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and various experiments in new and hypermedia –
concretism constitutes a significant position against which many of minimalism‟s most significant
characteristics might be measured. A patient examination of the concrete aesthetic is undertaken,
exposing the points of contact between concretism and minimalism, and illustrating the conditions under
which poietic atopia becomes evident – a non-space between matter and concept in which we glimpse
poiesis itself. Here the distinction of art from non-art is crucial, a distinction which minimalists, echoing
the Dadaists, habitually question, and occasionally refine.
Visually, sonically, conceptually and linguistically navigated forms of concretism open significant
avenues to minimalist objecthood – respectively in terms of the image, the pursuit of an ursound, the
concept and the interplay of text and language. In all cases, the questions of medium and mediation reflect
the difficulties which attend the subtraction of existence from Being. Is any medium sufficient ground for
distinguishing existential from superficial consonances; is it plausible to reconsider the concreteness of
minimalism in this seemingly abstract manner? Attending to these questions exposes with greater
precision the considerable stakes of concretism – the intensity with which poietic material coheres in a
maximally self-reflexive manner while presenting a minimal distance between form and content – which
significantly reshapes our understanding of minimalism and its reach. The argument is made that the
overarching concern of concretism is with the force of the example itself. Exemplarity is investigated as a
measure of the intensity with which an entity renders itself knowable. Such knowability does not manifest
in simple material terms, however, but, rather, constitutes an ontological field adjacent to the exemplary
entity – a para-ontology.
9
Except for the sake of consistency between sources in the cases of trans-ontology and trans-Being, non-hyphenated
form have been preferred when using the prefix trans.
18
Our attention is turned to the recognition that the exemplary force which establishes a minimalist paraontology is, finally, nothing other than an approximation of the force of production itself, or the means by
which poietic effort is tied to, and exemplifies, the Real. The provocative situation arises in which the
minimalist example is not only a meta-example – an example of exemplarity – but a presentation of the
manner in which structural homology or isomorphism constitutes the basis of exemplary knowability, and
possesses a genuine poietic or productive capacity. Having examined the terms of its principal thesis –
that minimalism exemplifies the facticity and persistence of the Real – the work concludes by confirming
the manner in which transumption is minimalism‟s proper existential logic. Throughout, three principal
modalities have been emphasized: containment, distension and distribution. These are now offered as a
typology of minimalism – one which encompasses well the principal concerns of the work as a whole,
while drawing attention to the increasing significance which the minimalist aesthetic harbours in light of
its progressive delineation.
b) Sub-theses in support of the principal thesis
It is now possible to offer in support of the primary thesis – that minimalism exemplifies the facticity and
persistence of the Real – a number of sub-theses:
i)
Being and existence are nonidentical – the latter is subtracted from, but without reducing, the
former.
ii)
Being is essentially quantitative.
iii)
From this quantity is drawn all that can be considered Real.
iv)
The Real, in turn, is what guarantees the persistence of entities – a persistence defined by the
capacity of entities to continue in some existential situation over a period of time; persistent
entities, conversely, guarantee the facticity of the Real.
v)
Such entities – which simultaneously exemplify existential persistence, the Real, and
ontological quantity – can be most reliably discovered in the situations in which they are
produced.
vi)
Such production is apprehended most clearly when it is an end in itself – in other words, in
terms of poiesis, which habitually generates as its products entities which belong to the
various fields of art.
19
vii)
Within art, the persistent quantity of the Real is exemplified with great force in works which
admit minimal impediments to apprehending the facticity of the taking-place of the Real.
viii)
The existential modality within which such poietic activity takes place might be defined by
various types of minimalism, affirming which requires us to revisit and extend the theoretical,
historical and aesthetic definition of minimalism.
ix)
The existential modality of minimalism is transumptive, exemplifying poietic activity in
terms of a displacement which manifests by three principal types of minimalism:
containment, distension, and distribution.
In summary, we might say that minimalism, by the poietic production of aesthetic entities which persist
within the Real, exemplifies the fact that the Real exists. Existing as it does, minimalism revivifies realist
ontological concerns alongside its radical re-examination of the media, forms and structure through which
aesthetic expression, perception and exemplarity take place.
2. MINIMALISM AS A DYNAMIC AESTHETIC MOVEMENT
a) Minimalism as an existential modality
The present work is not an historical study. The genealogy it offers is incomplete, with no final
delineation of a period to which its claims apply. Nor is it a critical catalogue of minimalist works,
although woven into its propositions is a range of examples drawn from every minimalist genre and style.
Its principal claims are for the most part not causal, and contextual information is at no point mistaken or
substituted for the emergence and persistence of entities themselves. Instead, it attempts to grasp
minimalism as a dynamic aesthetic movement, directed by a theoretical reflexivity capable of recognizing
that what minimalism is and how it is are inextricable: its content and modes of Being and existing are
thoroughly interwoven. In the present work, existential modality is employed to describe the manner in
which an entity exists. Having already drawn attention to the distinction of Being and existence, the
present investigation of minimalism‟s ontological and existential modalities marks in its works a manner
of Being capable of penetrating many different situations of existing; a manner of Being that marks in
certain entities their intrinsic processes of existing and of becoming. To claim that minimalism is revealed
20
in existence by the transformative logic of transumption, is to recognize the manner in which numerous
distinct minimalist phenomena, models and theories can be articulated simultaneously. Thus,
minimalism‟s historical poignancy arrives precisely inasmuch as it exemplifies a distributed history,
which proceeds obliquely through, and by its relation to, essentially transhistorical processes.
Minimalism names an existential orientation towards fundamental ontological quantity: minimum is, after
all, a quantitative marker – the least possible; the superlative form of that which is small or essential and,
by extension, uncomplicated, direct or immanent, either in conception, as process, or as the product of
such conception or process. Minimalism is used to designate forms, structures, systems and actual
entities. Indeed, it has been and continues to be investigated in fields as diverse as computer
programming, systems design, linguistics, sociology, theology, philosophy, law and art (including
architecture and various types of design) as an orientation towards discovering and constructing the most
essential, direct, simple and unambiguous access to the contents of these fields. As contemporary
existence in a complex, network society increasingly migrates from an abstract theoretical frame to
everyday praxis, is it not possible that minimalism will increasingly be offered not only as a utopian
rhetorical counter to this situation, but, moreover, as a disciplined and systematic means of rendering such
complexity intelligible?10
b) The tension between stasis and dynamis in the concept of an aesthetic movement
If minimalism marks simultaneously a quantitative logic of Being and the transumptive existential
modality of its objects, there is compelling reason to suppose that it should be restricted neither to a single
epoch nor to any particular medium, genre, style or type of expression. To retain the dynamic potential of
minimalism compels us to challenge the idea that it might be understood in any simple sense as an
aesthetic movement. Establishing the parameters of an aesthetic movement involves the construction of a
unified field upon which is demonstrated, projected, or forced a relation of similarity between a number
of entities, physical or conceptual.
10
In this sense, minimalism would offer an alternative explanatory strategy to those configurations which attempt to
model themselves in a manner not dissimilar to the phenomenon they seek to describe – autopoietic systems theory
for example, as opposed to the minimalist account of multiplicity and complexity developed by set theory and
translated into contemporary philosophical terms by Alain Badiou.
21
The advantages of classifying art in terms of distinct movements are several. The movement offers
epistemological stability to entities often as diverse as they are similar. Thus comparison is rendered
simpler: aesthetic works reveal their similarities and differences with greater transparency; processes of
change – whether the gradual formation of trends or sudden shifts in aesthetic attitudes, means of
production and theoretical understanding – are rendered more comprehensible, lending credence to the
proposition of the causes and effects of such transformations. In this light, movements also appear to
serve a weak predictive function regarding that which is likely to be produced, classified or reclassified
with reference to a specific movement. Indeed, every movement has an ideological component which is
deployed to foster certain attitudes, allegiances and opposition to a particular set of artworks.11
Convenient as it may be, the paradox at the heart of the concept movement is a significant one: the point
which promises to apprehend the relational dynamism of a situation prescribes not only stability, but
often also imposes a type of stasis. Movements become problematic when boundaries which were
intended to elucidate the manner in which entities belong to one another become confines encouraging
oversimplification in order retrospectively to impose unity of purpose, or projectively to prevent dissent.
In the case of minimalism, disproportionate critical energy has been expended on debating which
chronological limits are most appropriate, which minimalist canon is least objectionable, and how to
manoeuvre past aesthetic practitioners of every discipline who, for the most part, eschew the minimalist
label.12 The cost has been the possibility of interpreting minimalism as a dynamic existential modality
with radical ontological significance. In this light, the present discussion adopts the term canonical
minimalism to describe the works most closely associable with a consciously minimalist aesthetic – works
produced principally from the mid-1950s onward – while insisting that this very loosely defined canon in
no sense constitutes the horizon of a minimalist movement per se.
Giorgio Agamben insightfully encapsulates this problem by suggesting that “when the movement is there
pretend it is not there and when it‟s not there pretend it is.”13 Yet, if this captures the dynamic by which a
11
Following Danto, the non-hyphenated artwork has been preferred to art-work and art work except where it would
alter quotations.
12
David Batchelor, Minimalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 6-7. Strickland reports that sculptors Robert
Morris and Donald Judd, as well as composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass in music, objected vigorously to the
term (Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), 23), which is
similarly rejected by writers Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel (Cynthia Whitney Hallett, Minimalism and the
Short Story: Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin
Mellen, 1999), 8-9). Admittedly, this position derives as much from significant conceptual and aesthetic differences
as it does from the negative journalistic attention the term initially garnered (ibid.).
13
Giorgio Agamben, “Movement,” Uni.Nomade. Seminar War and Democracy, trans. Arianna Bove. 20 September
2011 <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/movement/>.
22
movement applies, it fails to apprehend precisely what a movement means, “a word everyone seems to
understand but no one defines,” at the risk of “compromising our choices and strategies.”14 If, as
Agamben suggests, “terminology is the poetic, hence productive moment of thought,” then to name a
movement – for “evidently in certain historical moments, certain codewords irresistibly impose
themselves and become adopted by antagonistic positions”15 – is an act of considerable significance
which permeates philosophy, science and politics as well as the aesthetic field.16 Agamben‟s central
observation17 is that every movement claims for itself an exceptional status in relation to that which it
organizes – a particular autonomy which necessitates that “the excluded elements from the movement
come[...] back as what must be decided upon,”18 and hence that objects of a movement become subject to
a certain stasis imposed by the movement itself.19 Thus we might understand the quasi-prophetic tone
which in Danto‟s writing asserts “the end of the movement in the movement‟s beginning, the end of a
period inscribed in its beginning.”20 The style of a particular movement is at once immanent and essential
to that movement – exempt from the ordinary flow from cause to telos – yet, when interpreted
diachronically, it gives the very shape that we conventionally term a linear history.21 In such a history,
“art is killed by art”22 as we find “movements stopping but not ending, ending but not stopping, ending
and stopping, and neither ending nor stopping.”23 The depth of consciousness of this situation as
exemplified by minimalism24 places it in the singular position both of suspending the progressive vision
of aesthetic movement and of reinvesting a dynamism within the notion of movement which is of
considerable importance to the present work.25
14
Ibid.
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
It should be noted cursorily that Agamben‟s discussion centres on political questions which arise from the work of
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt who distinguishes between state, movement and people – the last depoliticized so that the
movement is compelled to divide (repoliticize) and thus direct them according to the valences required to maintain
or impose the state as sovereign entity (ibid.) – exposed, in turn, to an Aristotelian reconceptualization of movement
(ibid).
18
Ibid.
19
“[T]he movement can only find its own being political by assigning to the unpolitical body of the people [an]
internal caesura that allows for its politicization” (ibid.).
20
Arthur C. Danto, “Style and Narrative,” Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), 243.
21
Ibid., 246.
22
Ibid., 247.
23
Ibid.
24
Here I focus on Danto‟s argument in a manner with which he would doubtless be uncomfortable. To begin with,
Pop Art and minimalism are for him symmetrical expressions of the same Hegelian consciousness of art historical
termination.
25
See Gregory Battcock, Introduction, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1968), 26. Collection hereafter MA.
15
23
For Agamben, preserving the dynamic potential of a movement resides in a return to a radical reappraisal
of the Aristotelian understanding of dynamis and kinesis as charged by their relation to potentiality: “the
act of a potenza as potenza [potentiality as potentiality], rather than the passage to act…[and as] an
imperfect act, without an end.”26 This ateleological understanding of the movement returns us to a sense
of immanent force in the present, oriented towards futurity, but which does not foreclose on the changing
valences which entities may demonstrate in belonging to a particular movement. The present formulation
– that an aesthetic movement unifies within a field of immanence the dynamic force of collectivity or
belonging and a progression from the finitude of the past towards an indefinite futurity, a progression
which renders identification possible without imposing any final identity – recalls that which Alain
Badiou understands in terms of truth procedure. Like a movement, a truth “makes it possible to group the
elements of a situation so that they all count in the same way.”27 “[T]ruths, and truths, alone, unify
worlds,” Badiou claims. “They transfix the disparate composites of bodies and language in such a way
that…these are, as it were, welded together…Only a truth opens…the world-to-come.”28
c) Naming minimalism
The name of a movement is of considerable significance to the force it signifies or exercises in its relation
of, and to, a truth procedure, operating as a type of ontological paradigm within which the understanding
of the entity which it denominates unfolds. In Caputo‟s estimation, “[n]ames belong to natural languages
and are historically constituted or constructed.”29 Accepting this argument, it is no surprise to discover the
significance of a nominal logic operating in all regions of philosophical history, from the pre-Socratic
naming of substance in terms of elements, through the Platonic eidos – indicated ideal, independent form
which is subsequently interpreted by Aristotle in terms of abstract universals. These pass through the
theological significance of the name of God into the high nominalism of medieval scholasticism and into
the Kantian a priori – perhaps the most powerful mark of that which the name lacks. One need look no
further than Husserlian nominal acts, through which the intentional content of consciousness is
confirmed, to witness the significance of names to phenomenologists. Indeed, the name is also placed at
the centre of analytical theoretical counterpoints, expressed in Russell‟s idea of definite definitions or
26
Agamben, Movement.
Peter Hallward, Introduction, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward
(London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 9.
28
Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 24. Hereafter SMP.
29
John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2006), 2.
27
24
Kripke‟s rigid designators – a hermeneutically informed recapitulation of medieval nominalism30 in
which the rigid designator “designates the same object in all possible worlds.”31 Contemporary
continental philosophy frequently pauses on the significance of the name: it is central in Derrida‟s work,
to Agamben‟s analysis of Aristotle, and, for Badiou, is a point of access between pure Being and
existence.
The present concern lies not with determining precisely how a name functions as it does, nor precisely
what these functions are, but instead with recognizing that wherever a name is given, is applied, or applies
itself, it reflects a frequently unarticulated ontological and existential commitment. This is precisely what
is asserted in affirming that a name and entity coincide, that the name exceeds the possibility of its
accurate application, or that reality cannot be equated with any act or process of nomination. In the case
of minimalism, the pull between dynamic and static categorization is mirrored with surprising precision in
the distinction of common from proper name, and in the designation of the movement by the lower-case
minimalism or the upper-case Minimalism.
The question of capitalization proves of considerable significance. Examining the manner in which each
is deployed by minimalist critics, it becomes evident that the proper sphere of identity – specific location,
stability, fixity – from which historical judgments and stylistic generalizations might be offered is
indicated by the use of the upper-case Minimalism. By contrast, the lower-case minimalism indicates
fluctuation, contingency, inclusiveness, but also a degree of vagueness.32 We might say that Minimalism
is primarily concerned with asserting the stable being of an artefact-driven poetics, empowering the
identification of a minimalist canon, while minimalism is concerned with an artefact-driven becoming –
an immersion of concept and praxis within dynamic poietic modalities. In this light, we do well to
recognize how readily the capitalized Minimalism converts poietic product into cultural capital. Studies of
Minimalism tend to take relative chronological or historical stability as their point of departure. This is
especially true of accounts contemporary with the widespread inception of the term,33 first applied to the
aesthetic context in 1937 by John Graham,34 but more famously used in 1965 in the slight variation,
30
John P. Burgess, “Why I am not a Nominalist,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 24:1 (1983), 96-7, 100.
Joseph LaPorte, “Rigid Designator,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 20 September 2011
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rigid-designators/#NamOrdDesIdeSta>.
32
See Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: U of California
P, 2005), 19-21.
33
Edward Strickland offers an excellent overview of the development of minimalism as a critical and journalistic
term, and the chronologies which discover their limits in relation to the several canonical understandings of
minimalism which prevail in the majority of criticism (Strickland, Minimalism, 17-20).
34
Kenneth Baker, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance (New York: Abbeville, 1988), 17.
31
25
Minimal Art, by philosopher Richard Wollheim.35 Minimalism is similarly recognized as the appropriate
and proper denomination36 for the abstract, direct and austere work of certain artists from the late 1950s
into the 1960s by Gregory Battcock,37 Clement Greenberg,38 Barbara Rose39 and, perhaps most
memorably, by John Perreault, who asserts that “[w]hat is minimal about Minimal Art...is the means, not
the end.”40 Kenneth Baker‟s injunction to “[t]hink of „Minimalism‟ as the name not of an artistic style but
of a historical moment, a brief outbreak of critical thought and invention in the cavalcade of postwar
American art,”41 is emblematic of the symmetry between clear historical delimitation and the proper
name, reflected also in the criticism of Marzona,42 Gablik,43 Batchelor44 and McDermott.45
The converse trend – the use of the lower-case minimalism – is observable in criticism which identifies its
objects primarily in terms of a conceptual orientation, an aesthetic sensibility, or existential modality.
Several of these studies are transhistorical and transdisciplinary – Edward Strickland‟s Minimalism:
Origins46 most notable amongst them,47 a model followed by Cheviakoff
48
and Bonet,49 and, more
narrowly, in Schwartz‟s account of musical minimalism. 50 More focused are the enquiries of Colpitt51 and
Potter,52 both shaped by formalist analytical concerns, yet which retain dynamism in their approaches.
While Colpitt stresses of her study that “Minimalism is not used here with a lowercase m...[but] restricted
to those artists who shared a philosophical commitment to the abstract, anticompositional, material
35
Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” MA, 388.
See Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Icon, 1989), 4.
37
Battcock, “Introduction,” 19.
38
Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” MA, 182.
39
Barbara Rose, “A B C Art,” MA, 278.
40
John Perreault, “Minimal Abstracts,” MA, 260.
41
Baker, Minimalism, 9.
42
Daniel Marzona, Minimal Art, ed. Ute Grosenick (Köln: Taschen, 2004).
43
Suzi Gablik, “Minimalism,” Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981),
244-55.
44
Cited above.
45
James Dishon McDermott, Austere Style in Twentieth Century Literature: Literary Minimalism (Lewiston,
Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2006). McDermott stresses precisely this distinction of upper-case
Minimalism from lower-case minimalism, albeit in somewhat different terms (ibid., 1-4).
46
As mentioned, Strickland‟s discussion of the emergence of minimalism as a movement is both detailed and
concise (Strickland, Minimalism, 1-25).
47
It should be mentioned that both Rose and Baker make significant observations regarding minimalism‟s
transhistorical dimension (Rose, “ABC,” 275, 278-9; Baker, Minimalism, 9-14, 27-32).
48
Sofía Cheviakoff, “Minimal Art,” Minimalism, Minimalist , ed. Sofía Cheviakoff (Köneman: Cologne, 2006), 35114.
49
Pilar Bonet, “Minimalism: A Historical Reflection,” Minimalism, Minimalist, ed. Sofía Cheviakoff (Köneman:
Cologne, 2006), 24-33.
50
K. Robert Schwartz, Minimalists (London: Phaedon, 1996).
51
Colpitt, Minimal Art.
52
Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalist: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000).
36
26
object,”53 her notion of movement remains dynamic inasmuch as it is informed by the properties of the
entities in question rather than by the means through which they are stabilized. Similar on account of its
subtlety regarding formal question, is Potter‟s study, drawing specific attention to his preference for the
lower-case minimalism on account of what he perceives as the rather more liberal application of the term
in music.54
The analyses of minimalism offered by Hal Foster,55 Walter Benn Michaels56 and Christopher Lasch57 are
directed by broader theoretical questions so that minimalism is itself understood as part of a conceptual
complex with an expansive shape. Similarly, Mertens,58 Meyer59 and Fink60 all place an emphasis on
minimalism as a dynamic system in which art interacts, often polemically, with a nexus of ideological,
economic and socio-political markers. It is no coincidence that the critically sanctioned Minimalism of the
visual arts and music should be capitalized more frequently than the somewhat ambiguous and tentative
identification of minimalism in literary criticism. Motte,61 Hallett,62 Herzinger,63 Verhoeven,64
Stevenson,65 Bellamy66 and, perhaps most acutely, John Barth,67 all prefer minimalism – albeit for
different reasons, and admitting that several of these expend significant energy bemoaning its
nomenclatural inadequacy.68 If, however, the minimalist sensibility is extended indefinitely it loses its
53
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 1.
Potter, Four, 1.
55
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass. and London:
MIT, 1996).
56
Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
UP, 2004).
57
Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (London: Picador, 1984).
58
Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, trans. J.
Hautekeit (London: Kahn and Averill, 1983).
59
James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001). Hereafter
MAP; James Meyer, Minimalism (London and New York: Phaedon, 2000).
60
Fink, Repeating.
61
Warren Motte, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature (Lincoln and London: U of
Nebraska P, 1999).
62
Hallett, Minimalism.
63
Kim A. Herzinger “Introduction: On The New Fiction,” Minimalist Fiction , ed. Kim A. Herzinger, spec. issue of
Mississippi Review 40/41 (1985): 7-22. This special issue is hereafter abbreviated MFMR.
64
W. M. Verhoeven, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Raymond Carver: Or, Much Ado About
Minimalism,” Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, ed. Theo D‟haen and Hans Bertens
(Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), 41-60.
65
Diane Stevenson, “Minimalist Fiction and Critical Doctrine,” MFMR: 83-9.
66
Joe David Bellamy, “A Downpour of Literary Republicanism,” MFMR: 31-9.
67
John Barth, “A Few Words About Minimalism,” Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 198494 (Boston: Little Brown, 1995), 64-74.
68
For Verhoeven, the classification of Carver as a minimalist is problematic (Verhoeven, What We Talk About, 436, 57-8), and Herzinger is equally vociferous about the problems inherent to the term (Herzinger, Introduction, 710).
54
27
currency, a situation which applies equally to its historical over-generalization as to the Postminimalist
situation indicated by Robert Pincus-Witten‟s eponymous publication.69
Between an astringent historicism and the paradoxical stasis imposed by an absolute unboundedness, the
present work avoids such extremes by asserting that the modalities within which minimalism emerges are
fundamentally non-categorical70 and essentially indifferent to the poietic or aesthetic situations they
ground. Thus, minimalism is able at once to be thoroughly historical – the “coherent”71 Minimalism
which, to Fink, is “a belated journalistic construction”72 against which Strickland also warns73 – and
dynamic, insofar as minimalism by its self-referential eschewal of reference presents the active poietic
means by which art, in clarifying itself, sympathetically clarifies what might be understood in terms of the
unfolding of reality.
In this light we grasp the continuity between Meyer‟s understanding of minimalism “not as a coherent
movement but as practical field”74 – “a dynamic field of specific practices”75 upon which is conducted a
“critical debate”76 as to minimalism‟s nature – and Redfield‟s claim regarding the “violent gestures with
which aesthetic systems seek to exorcise their inability to ground their claims.”77 The aesthetic movement
always harbours the danger of self-determined totalitarianism which, in systemic terms, we approach by
the recognition that its “identity is specified by a network of dynamic processes whose effects do not
leave that network.”78 This is why it is important to keep in mind Hal Foster‟s suggestion that every
avant-garde movement be understood as “a continual process of protension and retension, a complex
relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts...that throw over any simple scheme of before or after,
69
“Postminimalism could be seen to stand in…relationship to Minimalism, as so naturally continuous with it that it
may be regarded as part of the same impulse. Similarly, Postminimalism also strikes me as continuous with
Maximalism; Minimalism into Postminimalism and on into Maximalism, all part of the same continuum, especially
if we consider in the immense role played by a growing historicist impulse during this same period” (Robert PincusWitten, Postminimalism into Maximalism: American Art, 1966-86 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1987), 2). PincusWitten seems for the most part unaware of undermining his own argument. See Strickland, Minimalism, 6; Stephen
Melville, “What Was Postminimalism?,” Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (Oxford and
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 156-73.
70
Although Aristotle and Kant recognize quantity in categorical terms, the present work regards it as genuinely
radical, hence prior to categories which remain predominantly epistemological accounts of metaphysics.
71
Fink, Repeating, 19.
72
Ibid.
73
Strickland, Minimalism, 22.
74
MAP, 3.
75
Ibid., 4.
76
Ibid., 3.
77
Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996), x.
78
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human
Understanding (Boston and London: New Science Library, 1987), 89.
28
cause and effect, origin and repetition.”79 In this light, following Badiou, the present work decides in
favour of an ontological multiplicity which cannot readily be contained as such.80 Here we encounter the
fundamental axiom of ontology: that Being either is One or is not-One;81 either is unified and systemic or
is multiple. However, even accepting that Being is pure multiplicity, it is clear that for Being to be
presented or to appear at all, there must exist situations in which multiplicity is contingently counted-asOne without sacrificing its essentially multiple character. In short, multiplicity becomes structured.
However, according to Badiou, what escapes the structuring is the force of structuration itself; the Count
escapes being counted-as-One,82 necessitating a metastructure.83 Were this not the case, the contingency
at the heart of the Count would be eliminated, and the multiplicity of Being would be reasserted as unity
or One. If belonging to an aesthetic movement in the first instance is deduced from the properties of
particular objects and the associations which such properties prompt, then one might suggest that the
notion of a dynamic movement presents a metastructuration of such properties and relations.
In short, this notion of movement refocuses the ontological conditions of what previously was held to be a
predominantly epistemological exercise of recognizing resemblance – albeit such resemblances prompt
recognition as much by the senses as by the intellect. In this light, minimalism might further be
characterized as that which, both proper to entities and to the metastructural processes by which these
come to be grouped together, reveals the quantitative ontological dimension of artworks in as transparent
a manner as possible.
3. THE EMERGENCE OF MINIMALISM
a) A path of austerity towards clarity
Minimalism discovers a venerable if problematic lineage in the austerities – chosen or imposed;
environmental, material, psychological or spiritual – which play out in the deeply divergent existential
79
Foster, Return, 29.
BE, 28.
81
Ibid., 23-4.
82
Ibid., 93.
83
Ibid., 93-4.
80
29
courses and aims of the eremitic or cloistered religious life,84 the melancholic sense of the isolation of the
artist,85 and supposedly corrective system of incarceration. These share the conviction that extreme
simplicity, deprivation (whether imposed or by self-denial), withdrawal, solitude and discipline are to
some extent confluent and, moreover, transformatory. Thus, “the epiphany of the unattainable,”86 which
inspires the melancholic artist, and the solitude and silence that “enkindles and nurtures in our hearts the
fire of divine love, which is the bond of perfection,”87 to which the solitary monk aspires, express a logic
which is at once antagonistic and complementary – the suspension of the one enables the commencement
of the other. In the severe ideals of the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monk sleeps (“clothed, girded with
belts or cords”88) in order to rise to Opus Dei or the Work of God: an austere minimalism promises
transcendence. Conventionally art is less optimistic. Where moderate sleep deprivation is a means of
sanctification for the monk,89 it is a reminder of the painful irremissibility of existence for the melancholic
poet. The attractive despair of Emily Brontë‟s “Sleep brings no joy to me”90 lies precisely in that sleep
promises no opportunity for sanctification or transcendence, prompting only the desire for release from
“[d]eepen[ing] the gloom”91 of memory, absolvable only by the amnesia of death. Similarly, we might
argue that the drive towards a sacred simplicity92 which prompts Saint Francis‟ kataphatic embrace of
“Sister Bodily Death”93 in the early thirteenth century “Canticle of Brother Sun,”, is embodied
aesthetically not only in such austere reflections on the skull as symbol of death, as in El Greco‟s Saint
Francis Praying (Figure 1)94 and its subtle subversion of the tradition of the vanitas painting95 – but also
84
Although specific reference is made only to forms of west European religious life here, it should be noted in
passing that these in fact derive from the extremely austere practices of the third century (unless otherwise indicated,
all references to centuries AD or CE) desert fathers, hermits and stylites of near eastern Christianity. These find
notable parallels in the cultures and religions of the near and far east, but are largely parenthetic to the present
discussion, which limits itself to the aesthetic aspirations of western Europe and its immediate spheres of influence.
85
Agamben identifies the classical source, of what is often misdiagnosed as a predominantly Romantic
phenomenon, as Aristotle (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1993), 12-3).
86
Ibid., 26.
87
Statutes of the Carthusian Order. 20 November 2011 < http://www.chartreux.org/en/frame.html>. The Carthusian
order begins with the eleventh century revival of the eremitic tradition of the desert fathers as an alternative to the
cenobitic lifestyle which came to predominate both eastern and western monasticism from the sixth century.
88
Saint Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981), 49.
89
Ibid., 71.
90
Emily Brontë, “Sleep brings no joy to me,” The Poems of Emily Brontë, ed. Derek Roper and Edward Chitham
(Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 46.
91
Ibid.
92
Saint Francis of Assisi, “The Salutation of the Virtues,” Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Regis J.
Armstrong, O.F.M. CAP. and Ignatius C. Brady, O.F.M. (London: SPCK, 1982), 151-2.
93
Saint Francis of Assisi, “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” Francis and Clare, 39.
94
El Greco, Saint Francis Praying, 1580-85. Joclyn Art Museum, Omaha.
30
in its apophatic existential manifestation. In this respect we need only look to the opening of Beckett‟s
“For to end yet again” to discover a formulation which conforms to the best tradition of the contemporary
minimalist in the stark presentness of its constituent fragments and incremental repetitions: “For to end
yet again skull alone in a dark place pent bowed on a board to begin. Long thus to begin till the place
fades followed by the board long after. For to end yet again skull alone in the dark the void no neck no
face just the box last place of all in the dark void.”96
Figure 1:El Greco, Saint Francis Praying, 1580-85.
From an anthropocentric perspective, the skull is a marker of minimal existential intensity, making it a
poignant symbol of the aesthetic logic identified in the present work in terms of containment. It encases
the primary sensory organs97 as well as the brain, thus grounding the consciousness98 which is capable of
95
Vanitas paintings, which typically juxtapose images of human vitality and creativity with those of death, most
notably the skull, invariably seek to draw attention to the contingency of human life and the vanity of presuming to
deny or overcome this corporeal finitude.
96
Samuel Beckett, “Fizzle 8: For to end yet again,” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New
York: Grove, 1995), 243. Collection hereafter CSP.
97
Although touch is distributed, it goes without saying that the skin of the face is extremely sensitive.
31
constituting a coherent reality, a reality which reflects in the poietic enterprise something other than a
fatal inertia. It follows, thus, that the skull should function as a peculiar type of minimalist icon, both in
the hermit‟s cave in which we contemplate it from an external perspective, and in Beckett‟s prose, in
which it is almost always a symbol of the liminal point at which consciousness fails to extinguish itself.
The skull intimates both the bareness of the hermit‟s cave from which is drawn a transcendental freedom,
as well as the cell which incarcerates, rendering excedence as such implausible.
In this sense it is possible profitably to juxtapose the minimalist aesthetic of the monastic cell (Figure 2)
with the prison cell. The effect of both depends on a lean, sparse intensity. In Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault famously elaborates the manner in which the legislative, political and social exercise of
power comes to be harboured in the prison as biopolitical apparatus. In a remarkable passage he
characterizes its operation in terms of the
distribut[ion of] individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the
maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, coding their continuous behaviour,
maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of observation,
registration and recording, constituting on them a body of knowledge [regarding the
transformation of the individual and the group] that is accumulated and centralized.99
Where the monastic cell100 claims to contain the potential locus of spiritual transformation, the prison cell
is concerned with the “technical transformation of individuals”101 under the guise of reformation.102 Both
the monastic and prison cells are “complete and austere institutions”103 – the former is occupied by
voluntary penitents;104 in the latter, the occupants of the penitentiary are bound to the place by a legally
defined crime and juridically determined sentence.105
98
Neuroscience continues to discern precisely where the brain ends and the mind begins, and where precisely the
strategic processing of sensation gives way to the consciousness of a world.
99
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977), 231.
100
Regarding the austerity of the medieval monastic cell, we do well to recall that the average medieval dwelling
was by no means ornate or spacious. Where the cell differs most markedly is not by virtue of its architecture, but by
the manner of its incorporation within or exclusion from an institutional life.
101
Ibid., 233.
102
Ibid. 234-5.
103
Ibid., 235. Foucault borrows this term from writing of Baltard (ibid.).
104
Ibid., 244.
105
In this argument, Foucault draws several structural parallels between the monastic and penitentiary systems
(ibid., 238, 243-4).
32
Perhaps the modern paradigm of the most stark of prison cells is that of Nelson Mandela on Robben
Island (Figure 3). It is difficult to substantiate any stable causal pattern between the harsh, radically
austere conditions which Mandela and his fellow prisoners faced and the personal and political patience,
solidarity and perseverance they exhibited. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to suppose that there exists some
connection in this regard, and that its manifestation in terms of this haunting and uncanny species of
minimalism almost certain shapes the directness of its impact.
Figure 2: The cell of St. Theresa of Avilla,
Convento de la Encarnacion, Avilla, Spain.
Figure 3: Nelson Mandela's Prison Cell on Robben Island.
The continuity between the interior architectural aesthetic of the cell, the functionalist aesthetic of the
modern city, and a more conventional minimalism is clearly in evidence in Martin Boyce‟s installation,
Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the Birth (Figure 4).106 The work presents an urban
dystopianism in which domestic and public space – the spaces of the bedroom, the gallery and the public
park – are increasingly inseparable and subject to rigorous restriction. Park-bench and bed, cage and
home, tree and lamp – indeed gallery and domicile – are practically interchangeable. The influence of
minimalism is clear: fluorescent fixtures, made famous by Dan Flavin as sculptural material (Figure 5),107
106
Martin Boyce, Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the Birth, 2003/2008. Gallery of Modern Art,
Glasgow.
107
Dan Flavin, Monument 1 for V. Tatlin, 1964. Dia Art Foundation, New York.
33
form trees; the mesh from which beds, benches and bins are constructed recalls material used both by
Robert Morris (Figure 6)108 and Donald Judd (Figure 7).109
Figure 4: Martin Boyce, Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the Birth, 2003/2008.
108
Robert Morris, Untitled (Quarter-Round Mesh), 1967. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Mesh is also a favourite
material of Antony Caro‟s sculpture.
109
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965. Private collection.
34
Figure 5: Dan Flavin, Monument 1 for
V. Tatlin, 1964.
Figure 7: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965.
Figure 6: Robert Morris, Untitled (Quarter-Round Mesh), 1967.
35
Boyce‟s installation dislocates: the prepositions displayed on the faux ventilation shafts which are part of
the installation undermine their actual placement – behind is in front of the viewer, between is actually
beside, below is high on a wall (Figure 8). It is on account of its skeletal sparseness that the installation is
able to present the elision of intimacy and extimacy. The cell is literally located on the outside, in a public
exhibitionary space, by which an uncanny inversion of the monastic vision of seclusion is realized,
manifesting from a minimalism of interior severity an external but austere anarchism (Figure 9).
Figure 8: Martin Boyce, Our Love is like the Earth,
the Sun, the Trees and the Birth, 2003/2008.
Installation view.
Figure 9: Martin Boyce, Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun
the Trees and the Birth, 2003/2008. Installation view.
The central point to be taken for the present argument is that the minimalist aesthetic – simultaneously
concrete and conceptual, Real and symbolic – traverses the historic systems of religion, politics and law.
It does this by a depoliticization, or the subtraction of its constituent elements from the patently political
configurations to which they belong. The implicit, if naive, principle is that reinstating the tabula rasa of
an unformed polis rekindles the potentiality from which a pure politics might arise. The content or
orientation of this politics is itself undetermined. The architectural austerity of the cell, with its
transhistorical appeal to the silence and featurelessness which purportedly fuel contemplation, is merely a
concrete marker of the ideal of simplicity, transparency and immanence which informs not only precepts
such as the parsimony of scholasticism – briefly stated, the avoidance of the unnecessary multiplication
and complexification of entities – but also the puritan and quietist110 religious ethic. These, in turn,
develop into various species of pragmatism which manifest aesthetically in terms of a highly reductive
and functionalist aesthetic. This is nowhere clearer than in the case of the Quakers and Shakers.
110
Rose, ABC, 296.
36
The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, arose in seventeenth century England as part of the
protestant revival that gave rise to the various and geographically dispersed traditions which include
several German Evangelical groups, Methodists and Baptists. In a significant sense, Quakerism
democratizes111 the aesthetic ideals of western monasticism, situating a reverence for silence and
simplicity at the heart of its practice. Such ritualized silence is intended to enhance divine and
interpersonal communion by eliminating that which impedes a patient attentiveness.112 In the sense that it
aims for progressive access to the Real by means of conceptual and experiential clarification, Quakerism
legitimately describes a species of minimalism which marks itself as the container of potential
universality by means of disciplined exclusion of excess. Thus it also promotes both internal and external
temperance – simplicity of dress, speech and general life.
The charismatic and pentecostal revivals of the succeeding eighteenth century manifested in Quakerism a
tendency to more extroverted practices.113 Known first as Shaking Quakers, and subsequently simply as
Shakers, these individuals adopted a radical form of communitarian monasticism.114 Remarkable for its
promotion of equality of the sexes without demanding their absolute segregation115 (despite its advocacy
of celibacy) established productive, self-sufficient116 towns and communities in early nineteenth century
America as an alternative to absolute retreat from the world and society as such.117 While Shaker rituals
were markedly improvisational and elaborate, their aesthetic practice is notable for its distinct
minimalism. While contemporary minimalist composer, John Adams, attempts to reconcile these to some
extent in his 1978 Shaker Loops,118 of particular renown with regard to a minimalist sensibility is Shaker
111
Quakers placed significant emphasis on social and gender equality. Forrestal notes how, despite persecution and
opposition, the Quakers were amongst the first actively to promote pastoral equality between women and men
(Alison Forrestall, “The Church in the Tridentine and Early Modern Eras,” The Routledge Companion to the
Christian Church, ed. Gerard Mannion and Lewis S. Mudge (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 100-1. See
also Jill Raitt, “European Reformations of Christian Spirituality (1450-1700),” The Blackwell Companion to
Christian Spirituality , ed. Arthur Holder (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 133.
112
Ibid; See Stuart Sim, Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
UP, 2007), 7-9.
113
John Corrigan, “Protestantism in the United State of America to the Present Day,” The Blackwell Companion to
Protestantism, ed. Alistair E. McGrath and Darren C. Marks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 171.
114
These “experiments typically had a religious or spiritual as well as a social animus” (Baker, Minimalism, 14).
115
By viewing God as both paternal and maternal, the Shakers organized themselves into families which consisted
of both brothers and sisters (Corrigan, “Protestantism,” 171). These families lived in single houses although,
doubtless for practical reasons of maintaining their strict celibacy, maintained a certain practical distance.
116
Baker, Minimalism, 14.
117
Corrigan, “Protestantism,” 171.
118
John Adams, Shaker Loops, 1978/1983. See Schwartz, Minimalists, 177-8.
37
furniture which in its simplicity and symmetry is noteworthy for its functionality 119 and the manner in
which it is integrated with Shaker architecture (Figure 10).120
Figure 10: Great Stone Dwelling House, Enfield Village, New Hampshire, 1837-41.
Visually pleasing in its austerity, yet seldom decorative in the conventional sense (Figures 11 and 12),
Shaker furniture seems to generate rather than to occupy space, and is readily portable, convertible and
storable (principally, chairs were hung on walls) in a manner which anticipates the functionalist thrust of
Russian Constructivism (Figure 13)121 and Bauhaus architecture and design122 (Figure 14).123 Towards the
119
Most contemporary minimalism is functionless in an objective sense. However, it does not merely reverse
functionalism, but in many cases instigates a critique of consumerism by offering itself as a parody of its own
functionlessness (Lasch, Minimal Self, 31).
120
“Their rejection of ornament for an elegance born of optimum economy and practicality of design has an
unmistakable resonance with aspects of some Minimal art” (Baker, Minimalism, 14).
121
Ivan Zvesdin, School 518, 1935. Moscow, Russia.
122
Murray Roston, Modernist Patterns in Literature and the Visual Arts (New York: New York UP, 2000), 129.
123
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau, 1924-5. Dessau, Germany.
38
revered Bauhaus dictum – less is more124 – also flows the symmetrical current of classicism, from its
Hellenic origins to its eighteenth century revival. In turn, the Bauhaus and constructivist case extends
almost seamlessly to the work of De Stijl with its minimalist grids, chromatic limitation125 and Gestalt
forms, is a central principle of much subsequent minimalist art and design.126 It takes no deductive skill to
recognize a related stylistic sensibility in Rietveld‟s Zig-Zag Chair of 1934 (Figure 15)127 and the 1991
Chair 84/85128 of Donald Judd – one of minimalism‟s canonical sculptors and critics (Figure 16).129
Figure 11: Shaker kitchen and furniture, Pleasant Hill,
Kentucky, undated.
124
Figure 12: Shaker wall with built-in cupboards,
Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, undated.
This phrase was adopted by Mies van der Rohe as the principal of minimalist design, and is exemplified in the
works of other Bauhaus architects such as Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, as well as in De Stijl of Theo
van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld amongst others. See Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 74-5.
125
For the most part, De Stijl uses only primary colours, black and white.
126
See Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 72-7.
127
Gerrit Rietveld, Zig-zag Chair, 1934. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
128
Donald Judd, Chair 84/85, 1991. Chinati Foundation, Marfa.
129
See MAP, 7; Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 110.
39
Figure 13: Ivan Zvesdin, School 518, 1935.
Figure 14: Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau, 1924-5.
40
Figure 15:Gerrit Rietveld, Zig-zag Chair, 1934.
Figure 16: Donald Judd, Chair 84/85, 1991.
Tracing a reductive line from the “rudimentary, utilitarian elements introduced by the early settlers,”130
through the austerity of Shaker design, to more contemporary expressions of this minimalist imbrication
of locus and Geist, several critics draw attention to minimalism as a socio-cultural path of austerity
towards the clarification of the Real.131 Kenneth Baker considers minimalism a “distinctly American
tradition of respect for plain facts and plain speaking, manifested in Shaker furniture and the pragmatist
philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce.”132 Indeed, it should be clear that the pragmatic functionalism133 of
such austere design is no small part of minimalism‟s origin or legacy. However, if the case is most
persuasively made with reference to the American context,134 I remain convinced that the logic of
containment which moves through minimalism cannot contain minimalism itself. From the perspective of
style, the reverse may readily be asserted: that “minimal artists and their work are indebted to the
European modern tradition in the areas of neoplasticism, suprematism and constructivism.”135
130
Roston, Modernist Patterns, 129.
Strickland, Minimalism, 20; Foster, Return, 52;
132
Baker, Minimalism, 13.
133
Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 80.
134
Like Baker, Strickland regards minimalism as “an indigenous American style” (Strickland, Minimalism, 3).
Similar argument are forwarded by Colpitt (Colpitt, Minimal Art, 1), Schwartz (Schwartz, Minimalists, 10) and
Meyer (Meyer, Minimalism, 34). Mertens offers a useful description of the manner in which early American
minimalism, relying most often on repetition, is related to various types of European minimalism and exhibits the
clear influence of Indian, Balinese and West African music (Mertens, American, 12, 32, 44, 56, 67, 91-2).
135
Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 68.
131
41
Minimalism may well draw a significant part of itself from the same point of transcendence to which
mystical experience alludes. Barbara Rose makes this connection explicit in terms of “the state of
blankness and stagnation preceding illumination.”136 The minimalist dimension of aesthetics and of
spiritual interrogation share an attempt to approximate in minimally positive terms that which escapes
positive presentation altogether. Few critics, however, recognize the numerous points of confluence
between minimalism and religious asceticism. There can be little doubt that the sociological analysis of
religion rests on an understanding of its ideological dimension; nor that the more adventurous studies of
minimalism137 attend to its ideological implications over its aesthetic concerns. However, few recognize
that the latter expresses in relation to the former what is itself quite patently an ideology of sacred or holy
minimalism:138 that an encounter with material minimalism is transformed by a sacred transcendence.
That here exists a force of transformation – one which is clearly in force, but without clear parameters –
offers what we legitimately recognize as the empty paradigm of ideological operation.139
This is evident in the work of leading minimalists, regardless of how we choose to define this term. The
compositional techniques of La Monte Young and Terry Riley – the respective progenitors of minimalist
soundscapes of extreme duration, and the use of modular repetition – considered their music
fundamentally spiritual.140 Glass‟ early composition reflects the influence of Indian classical music
(which often has an explicitly religious dimension)141 and he is a practising Tibetan Vasjaryana
Buddhist,142 which has and continues to fuel both the subjects and substance of much of his music.143
136
Rose, “ABC,” 296. She evokes in relation to minimalism the “semihypnotic state of blank consciousness, of
meaningless tranquillity and anonymity that both Eastern monks and yogis and Western mystics” (ibid.), making
specific mention of John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Miguel de Molinos and Evelyn Underhill (ibid.).
137
I think particularly of Meyer, Fink and Foster in this regard.
138
We should note cursorily that the term holy minimalism has been deployed – albeit in a rather vague sense – to
distinguish those postminimalist composers whose thematic concerns are principally religious.
139
Agamben (following Benjamin) recognizes this as the dangerous situation in which laws – while no longer
effective with regard to that which they legislate – are nonetheless implemented in such a way that there is no longer
any real distinction between law and life (Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and
London: U of Chicago P, 2005), 63-4). Hereafter SE.
140
Potter, Four, 19, 79-80, 103-4, 137. According to Rose, “[t]he „continuum‟ of La Monte Young‟s Dream music is
analogous in its endlessness to the Maya of Hindu cosmology” (Rose, ABC, 296).
141
Schwartz, Minimalists, 114-6; Potter, Four, 257-8.
142
Ibid, 259; Schwartz, Minimalists, 117; Fink, Repeating, 231.
143
The incorporation of Tibetan chant and instruments with his characteristically minimalist technique is impressive
in the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese‟s Kundun, which relates the early life of the incumbent fourteenth Dalai Lama.
The opera Satyagraha deals with Mahatma Gandhi‟s philosophy of passive resistance, while Akhnaten revolves
around the ultimately failed monotheistic reforms of the Egyptian pharaoh of the same name and includes perhaps
the most compelling example of theurgical minimalism – “The Funeral of Amenhotep III” (Philip Glass, “The
Funeral of Amenhotep III,” Akhnaten. CBS, 1987).
42
Steve Reich‟s Different Trains144 and Tehillim (Track 1)145 expose the composer‟s interest in and study of
Jewish history and music (especially cantillation) and their confluence in his brand of minimalism. 146 A
generation later, several of minimalism‟s most imposing and creative figures composed what has, not
inappropriately, been called holy minimalism. Arvo Pärt (Track 2)147 and John Tavener (Track 3)148 are
principal amongst these, their work reaching back not only to the musical modes of medieval Catholic
Europe and the Orthodox East, but to the minimalist existential modalities which accompany the search
for spiritual clarity. We might make similar, although more varied and occasional, comments regarding
both the theurgical and contemplative in the music of Meredith Monk,149 Henryk Gorecki, Gavin Bryars
and Nico Muhly.150 Neither should we disregard the remarkable creative synergy which existed between
the writer and Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, the painter Ad Reinhardt – who, for his relentless
exploration of black monochromatic painting, is often styled the “heretical black monk of Abstract
Expressionism”151 – and the concrete poet or “conceptual Minimalist,”152 Robert Lax.153
Likewise, the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman manifest two opposing, but equally minimalist,
aesthetic responses to an overwhelmingly religious sense of awe. Attempting to “purge[...] their work of
extraneous elements in order to develop an art of transcendental immediacy,”154 Rothko seeks to draw the
religious into the aesthetic realm by means of its sheer chromatic density, while Newman, bisecting
144
Steve Reich, Different Trains, 1988.
Steve Reich, Tehillim, 1981. ECM, 1981.
146
Potter, Four, 151-2; Schwartz, Minimalists, 83-89.
147
Arvo Pärt, Miserere. ECM, 1990.
148
John Tavener, “The Ways to Salvation,” Mary of Egypt: An Opera. Collins, 1992.
149
Amongst Meredith Monk‟s work, which seeks to “break[...] down boundaries between the disciplines, an art
which in turn becomes a metaphor for opening up thought, perception and experience,” (Meredith Monk, “Mission
Statement, 1983, Revised 1996,” Meredith Monk , ed. Deborah Jowitt (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP,
1997), 17. Within this ambitious frame, Monk‟s work frequently returns to a concern with ritual and religion.
Vessel: an opera epic (1971) recasts in a symbolic order events from Joan of Arc‟s life (see Marcia B. Siegel,
“Virgin Vessel,” Meredith Monk, 36-9). Dolmen Music (Meredith Monk, Dolmen Music, 1979) meanwhile makes
clear reference to a religious invocation (David Sterritt, “Notes: Meredith Monk, Meredith Monk, 108-9), and the
film and music of Book of Days (Meredith Monk, Book of Days, 1985/1990) offers what one might call a
prophetico-historic vision of the social conditions within which Jews existed in medieval Europe.
150
As regards their classification as holy minimalist, Gorecki is principally known for his Symphony No. 3 (Henryk
Gorecki, Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), 1976), Bryars is responsible for the remarkable Cadman
Requiem (Gavin Bryars, Cadman Requiem, 1989) and Muhly, a former-chorister, the influences of Anglican
anthems and canticles are audible in his some of his work.
151
Rose, “ABC,” 285-6.
152
Karen Alexander, Minimalism in Twentieth Century American Writing. Diss. University College London, 2005,
184.
153
Ibid., 186-7. It is worth examining the numerous, idiomatic, stylized and often amusing letters exchanged
between Merton and Lax (Thomas Merton and Robert Lax, “A Catch of Anti-Letters,” Voyages: A National Literary
Magazine II.I-II (1968), 44- 56.
154
Meyer, Minimalism, 24.
145
43
massive fields of heavy colour with bright zips, attempts to generate a sense of the sublime encounter.155
Dan Flavin – for his intermediary success perhaps minimalism‟s most significant innovator – was at one
point a Roman Catholic seminarian, and numerous of his installations aim to draw out the relationship
between luminescence and illumination. Likewise, in claiming to “paint with her back to the world,”156
Agnes Martin embraces in the subtle girds and extremely fine chromatic rhythms of her minimalist
paintings and drawings (Figures 17 and 18)157 an overtly ascetic, even eremitic ideal.
Figure 17: Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, (1997.
Figure 18: Agnes Martin, Untitled #9, 1990.
In writing, however, most minimalists – Raymond Carver, Joan Didion and Frederick Barthelme, for
instance – reflecting a heightened concern with realism, appear either indifferent to or disillusioned with
religion and spirituality. Notable exceptions, although not strictly speaking minimalists, are the polymath
John Cage, who made extensive use of the I Ching and various techniques of Zen to produce his work,
and Samuel Beckett who enjoys a productively ironic relationship with organized religion – at once
scathing and deeply comical.
155
Although, as Meyer notes, “the Minimalists...rejected the metaphysical claims of the Abstract
Expressionists...Even so, there were some artists associated with Minimalism who did not discount the expressive
potential of pared-down abstraction” (Meyer, Minimalism, 24).
156
Agnes Martin, Interview with Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama. November 2007. 20 November 2011
<http://vimeo.com/7127385>.
157
Respectively Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1997. Private collection; Agnes Martin, Untitled #9, 1990. Collection
unspecified.
44
In One Word Poems158 – the twenty-fifth issue of Ian Hamilton Finlay‟s journal of poetry, Poor Old Tired
Horse – we discover what should be recognized as amongst the most radical expressions of aesthetic
minimalism, yet which remains virtually unknown. In a letter to Stephen Bann, Finlay suggests that “a
one-word poem consists of one word and a title of any length.”159 Almost twenty-years later, in a letter to
Jessie Sheeler, his aesthetic resolve remains firm: “I feel more and more that the purest poetry exists in
single words or seemingly minute effects. These are what lodge in one.”160 Indeed, it is by this logic that
Finlay attempts to uncover in a one-word poem nothing less than the very currency of Arcadia – the
means by which poietic generation can be exchanged for a utopian vision; the alphabet in its infinite
permutations for an experience of the infinite itself:
Arcady
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ161
By presenting itself in terms of the most fundamental constituents of every expressive medium,
minimalism exhibits its determination to uncover the fundamental stuff of poiesis. In this sense, its
ambition is to outflank any act of classification.
b) The minimalist transection of modern and postmodern
There is clearly more to minimalism than meets the senses. Reserved in the transparency, simplicity,
austerity and immediacy of its objects is a remarkable capacity for transformation. This capacity has been
harnessed in numerous ways by the institutions and practices of religion, but permeates other more
contemporary fields of ideological disputation as well. In particular, minimalism opens into a polemical
field162 upon which the reification of value through the commodification of art is able to take place. This
is perhaps clearest, though not restricted to, the works produced between 1950 and 1970 which are most
regularly discussed as components of canonical Minimalism. If minimalism presents the apotheosis of
abstraction, this presentation is offered upon the field of ruination which follows the Second World War.
158
Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed., “One Word Poems,” Poor Old Tired Horse 25 (1967): 1-8.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Model of Order: Selected Letters On Poetry and Making, ed. Thomas A. Clark (Glasgow:
WAX366, 2009), 44.
160
Ibid., 54.
161
Ian Hamilton Finlay, “Arcady,” One Word Poems, 8.
162
MAP, 6.
159
45
As Adorno163 and Lyotard164 recognize, the history of mimesis is decisively disrupted by the horrors of
this war, and of the extermination of the Jews in particular. Of Lyotard‟s understanding of this failure of
representation, Rancière notes the following:
[t]he absence of any common measurement [between art and life] is here called catastrophe...If
modern art must preserve the purity of its separations, it is so as to inscribe the mark of this
sublime catastrophe whose inscription also bears witness against the totalitarian catastrophe – that
of the genocides, but also that of aestheticized (i.e., in fact anaesthetized) existence.165
In this situation, extreme forms of abstraction appear to take on different intensities of reflexivity which
distinguish the modern from the postmodern.166 This general field of special reflexivity Lyotard identifies
with the regime of the sublime – the negative pleasure which arrives when, in the face of an aesthetic
stimulus which initially overwhelms us, we are able to affirm our mastery and the final ascendency of
mind over phenomena.167 “[M]odern art...devotes [itself] to present[ing] the fact that the unpresentable
exists,”168 whereas “postmodern [art is]...that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself.”169 Modern art habitually points to a transcendental aperture, attempting to extract
itself from the ordinary forms of mimetic economy by a process of careful and progressive abstraction.
The art of postmodernism seals this aperture: that which in modernism is recognized in terms of
abstraction appears now paradoxically immanent – incapable of transcendence, but neither associable
with a formal prototype. If modernist abstraction encourages the tracing of formal processes of reduction
evident in its works, postmodernism tends to present its objects in their immanence. Thus, recalling Fried,
while the modernist work searches for an “instantaneousness”170 in which “[p]resentness171 is grace,”172
163
Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” Notes to Literature, Vol. 1 , trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen, (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 244-6, 266-7.
164
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1988), 56-8.
165
Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 40-1.
166
“[O]nly with minimalism does this understanding become self-conscious. That is, only in the early 1960s is the
institutionality not only of art but also of the avant-garde first appreciated and then exploited” (Foster, Real, 56).
167
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 98, 105-6; JeanFrançois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1994), 75-6; 112-4. Also see Jean- François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” The Inhuman:
Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 98; Paul Crowther,
The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 80-3; Geoffrey Bennington,
Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 165-9.
168
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question What Is Postmodernism?,” trans. Régis Durand, The
Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984), 78.
169
Ibid., 81.
170
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” MA, 147.
171
The italics here are mine.
172
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 146. See Michaels, Shape, 88-9; Foster, Return, 52.
46
the same concept in postmodernism rests on a sense of immediacy or presence.173 Accordingly, where
modernism aims to “compel conviction...[and] to seek the essential,” postmodernism tends to “cast
doubt...and to reveal the conditional.”174
Critics tend to emphasize a decisive shift: from a spatially dominated modernist vision in which the
epiphanic experience of time presents the possibility of transcendence – almost an existential escapeclause within the legislation of aesthetic experience – to a stress on time as the concrete and sequential
passage of moments (albeit with indeterminate content) within which an artwork is perceived.175
However, as Patricia Waugh argues, any vigorous distinction of modern from postmodern is more likely
to rest on a critical overdetermination than on the actual properties of actual artefacts. The result is a
failure to recognize the “radical situatedness”176 which has marked the aesthetic field at least since early
romanticism.177 Canonical minimalism occupies a singularly ambiguous position in this respect. Its works
in every medium are as frequently concerned with autonomy (of a particular formalist species) and
indifference to context and meaning178 as they are with their status as relational objects. It is this same
disposition which articulates numerous mid-twentieth century attempts to radicalize objectivity in the
form of objecthood, exemplified by Robbe-Grillet in his search for an aesthetic to present a “world
[which] is neither meaningful nor absurd. It quite simply is. And that…is what is most remarkable about
it.”179
Modernist in its formalism, postmodern for the sheer facticity of its objecthood, minimalism exists upon
the cusp between these two great contemporary epistemes. Perhaps “the last „classic‟ period before the
flood of artistic flotsam and jetsam termed „post-Modernist,‟”180 minimalism presents itself “as a
173
Ibid., 50.
Foster, Return, 58.
175
The “minimalist work complicates the purity of conception with contingency of perception, of the body in a
particular space and time” (ibid., 40).
176
Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 22.
177
Ibid., 17-8, 22.
178
Simon Critchley‟s recognition in the Beckettian aesthetic of a means of “establishing the meaning of
meaninglessness, making meaning out of the refusal of meaning that the work performs without that refusal of
meaning becoming a meaning” is applicable to much of minimalism (Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing:
Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 151). On minimalism‟s evasion of meaning see Foster,
Return, 40. Fink presents the alternative of a minimalism with “at least the theoretical possibility of meaning” (Fink,
Repeating Ourselves, xiii).
179
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “A Path for the Future Novel,” Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright
(London: Calder and Boyars, 1965), 53.
180
Strickland, Minimalism, 3.
174
47
historical crux in which the formalist autonomy of art is at once achieved and broken up,” 181 and is thus
identifiable with the sense of dynamic aesthetic movement offered above. Through its pursuit of
objecthood over objectivity,182 minimalism at once “completed and broke with [modernist aesthetic
practice].”183 Less benign in her assessment is Anna C. Chave, who claims that “Minimalism forms the
terse, but veracious last word in a narrowly framed argument about what modern art is or should be.”184
However, Chave‟s reading is as selective as it is polemical, and we do well to turn to the less biased
understanding of Rosalind Krauss which seeks to clarify the singular position minimalism occupies upon
the cusp between modernity and postmodernity. By its formal austerity, minimalist art effects a scission
with “the styles that immediately precede it,”185 yet on “another level186 can be seen as renewing and
continuing the thinking”187 of high modernism. Minimalism draws into a single, charged poietic sphere
both constancy and variability188 in which “space and time cannot be separated for the purpose of
analysis,”189 gesturing towards the reconciliation of these most distinct markers of the modern from the
postmodern. Krauss “projects a minimalist recognition back onto modernism so that she can then read
minimalism as a modernist epitome [in which case] minimalism is an apogee of modernism, but it is no
less a break with it.”190
In this light aesthetic modernism harbours the final figure of its transfiguration by abstraction – a selfreflexive present at once sublime and unambiguously Real. Affirming in minimalism the literalism191
which Fried sees as its most salient feature, painter Frank Stella claims of his work that “only what can be
seen there is there...What you see is what you see.”192 Neither intrinsically meaningful nor nihilistic,
181
Foster, Return, 54. See Batchelor, Minimalism, 8.
Ibid., 46.
183
Ibid., 35. See ibid., 53-4,
184
Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical
Texts, ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (London: Phaidon, 1992), 27.
185
Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977), 279.
186
Krauss is talking here primarily of abstract, minimal abstract sculpture which retains an anthropocentric element
as long as its effect is measured in relation to the human body and movement (ibid.).
187
Ibid.
188
Foster, Return, 47.
189
Krauss decisively seeks to overturn separation of temporal from spatial arts inherited from Lessing. See page 270
of the present work.
190
Foster, Return, 42. There is both risk and promise in this technique – not entirely dissimilar to the one adopted in
the present work – which reopens categories often prematurely closed by adherence to various ideologies of
historicizing, yet which itself clearly embodies a particular ideology.
191
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 117.
192
Frank Stella‟s celebrated statement is from a conversation recorded between himself, Donald Judd and Bruce
Glaser in 1966 (Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” MA, 158).
182
48
minimalism aims to provoke directness of affect193 and aesthetic effect such that it is still possible, with
Lyotard, that the “task of art remains that of the immanent sublime, that of alluding to an
unpresentable...which is inscribed in the infinity of the transformation of „realities.‟”194
The aesthetic economy of minimalism must be understood as the persistent attempt to clarify the Real, 195
and, inasmuch as the Real underpins every possible reality, minimalism offers the objectal 196 pivot upon
which existential situations are potentially transformed. Such transformation touches the heart of the
multiple institutions which negotiate and finally prescribe value; and in its capacity for generating
maximum effect from minimal means,197minimalism transects, at the most radical level, the relation of
art, economy and power.
c) Institution and economy
If the minimalist aesthetic is directed by a self-conscious radicalism – the desire to reveal the essential
quantity of Being itself – its appearance in terms of a movement, whether canonical or a brief spasm
towards simplicity and clarity, centres a revolutionary impulse to “disrupt[...] the formal categories of
institutional art.”198 Like Foster, Danto recognizes that in minimalism art comes to an historical
reflexivity, but also a suspension of its historicity199 – a “self-conscious position on art”200 which emerges
“in the early 1960s [in the manner in which]...the institutionality not only of art but also of the avantgarde [is] first appreciated and then exploited.”201 Recognizing that the limits of any definition of art are
contingent rather than absolute,202 Danto‟s thought prompts a number of theories of art – not all congruent
193
Paolo Berdini, “Similar Emotions/Dissimilar Objects: The Pilkington Paradigm and minimalist and baroque art,”
Perceptible Processes: Minimalism and the Baroque, ed. Clausia Swan (New York: EOS, 1997), 43.
194
Jean-François Lyotard, “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable,” The Inhuman, 128.
195
Battcock, Introduction, 32.
196
The terms objectal and subjectal should be understood in the present work as distinct from objective and
subjective, with the former two emphasizing the object and subject in themselves, and the latter the processes,
methods and sequences related to such objects and subjects.
197
Perhaps the most austere of minimalist sculptors, Carl Andre, remarks of minimalism that it involves “„the
greatest economy in attaining the greatest ends‟” (Baker, Minimalism, 14). See Perreault, Minimal Abstracts, 260,
262; Hallett, Minimalism, 2.
198
Foster, Return, 54.
199
Arthur C. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge, Mass. and London:
Harvard UP, 1981), vii-viii, 56-7; Foster, Return, 51-2.
200
Ibid., 56.
201
Ibid.
202
Danto, Transfiguration, 45-7.
49
with his own203 – which emphasize the institutional nature of defining art qua art. Danto does not,
however, accede to the vulgar reduction of art simply to objects designated as such by an “institutionally
enfranchised group.”204 Finally he affirms that art is knowable as such by its ontological properties, but
that these take shape within institutional configurations in which relative value is decided by contingent
yet normative social, political and economic significance.
The canonical minimalist aesthetic took firm root in an American society205 which, despite the “slow,
almost reluctant shaking off of the obedient conformity the war effort had demanded”206 at a domestic
level, had rapidly risen to a position of unrivalled economic and political dominance in the west.207 In the
1950s and early 1960s prosperity was the prevailing condition. That America was “[n]o longer a
province, but the center of the new capitalist empire”208 resulted not only in the increased material
prosperity of the 1950s, but also in a burgeoning sense of cultural confidence. “For all its apparent
restrictions, minimalism opened up a new field of art,”209 a sense of novelty to match the utopian
domestic vision of the 1960s and 1970s, while “[f]or all its apparent freedoms, neo-expressionism
participated in the cultural regression of the Reagan-Bush era”210 and its chastening of American identity.
In this climate, competition and excellence211 were rapidly assimilated into a social vision which makes
the force of identity and the act of identification central both to the individual and corporation, rendering
these increasingly indistinguishable.212
The resultant “epidemic of popular narcissism”213 complicates the distinction of subjectivity and
individuality.214 The individual is trained to objectify his or her own subjectivity215 in terms of a
203
Arthur C. Danto, “The Art World Revisited: Comedies of Similarities,” Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in
Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), 41.
204
Danto, Transfiguration, 91.
205
However, as Baker observes, canonical minimalism would soon be an international phenomenon (Baker,
Minimalism, 12, 14).
206
Ibid., 15.
207
Baker, Minimalism, 27-8.
208
Ibid., 27.
209
Foster, Return, 36.
210
Ibid.
211
Excellence mobilizes desire in a rather terrifying manner: it “has no external referent or internal content” (Bill
Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1996), 23) and misrepresents a
ruthlessly quantitative logic of accumulation and acquisition as quality.
212
Ibid., 21-2; Baker, Minimalism, 16.
213
Ibid., 15; Lasch, 24-5, 29-30. As Lasch observes, “[a] culture organized around mass consumption encourages
narcissism...a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one‟s own fears and
desires” (ibid., 33).
214
Baker, 16.
215
Lasch, 29-30.
50
“boundless appetite for change,”216 with the consequence that the markers of individuality are
commodified, and the individual becomes a consumer of his or her own identity. Individuality is
subsumed within a self-limiting dialectic: a constant exchange of dominant, popular and countercultural
expression – progressive inasmuch as it generates the necessary difference to guarantee that every
individual might still associate the right to individuality with a fundamental expression of freedom;
regressive in that culture is then in a position to prescribe and distribute the amount and type of difference
an individual apparently requires in order to be sufficiently substantial and free. When freedom is thus
guaranteed, the individual is in fact at its most compliant with a corporate model of society which
ingeniously consumes difference by reifying actual differences – both as particular values but, moreover,
as specific objects which must be produced and consumed as paradoxically necessary commodities.
In this situation, a commodity such as art which, at first, appears to be entirely generative, finally proves
intricate in the production of the very needs it claims to satisfy. As Lasch correctly observes,
“[c]ommodities are produced for immediate consumption. Their value lies not in their usefulness or
permanence but in their marketability. They wear out even if they are not used, since they are designed to
be superseded by „new and improved‟ products.”217 Art is by no means exempted from this logic. That the
minimalist object “mimes the degraded world of capitalist modernity in order not to embrace but to mock
it,”218 does not bar these works from being substituted for the absence of subjective identity in the
“unremitting consumption of sensation”219 which characterizes the contemporary. “Minimalism marks the
transition of twentieth-century art from its waning as an autonomous and implicit critique of mass culture
to its demystification and acceptance as but another commodity,”220 Strickland suggests.
In short “the social attitude of minimalism...is ambivalent,”221 emerging at once in opposition to the
reduction of art to product, yet unable, finally, to resist its own commodification. 222 In the visual arts, a
number of seminal exhibitions took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the Guggenheim, Whitney
and Jewish Museums in New York, the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles, the Hague Gemeentemuseum, and
216
Ibid., 29;
Lasch, Minimal Self, 31.
218
Foster, Return, 15-6.
219
Strickland, Minimalism, 3.
220
Ibid. In this respect, Potter observes that “[j]ust as Minimalist art acted as a critique of commercialized society
and challenged its viewers to adopt new modes of perception, so minimalist music…required new modes of
listening” (Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 14).
221
MAP, 9.
222
Ibid., 8-9.
217
51
the Tate Gallery in London amongst many others.223 James Meyer does well to recognize the considerable
polemical significance these exhibitions played in the development of a minimalist canon.224 The epochal
Primary Structures exhibition curated by Kynaston McShine at the Jewish Museum in 1966,225 confirmed
not only the significance and status of canonical minimalism, but set in motion the critical machinery
which would distinguish minimalism from its predecessors.226
“Minimalism…[is a] creation[…] not only of artists, but of ancillary art-world professionals,”227 and is
intensified by the concurrency with which artefacts and the critical literature assessing and theorizing
these arose. As Colpitt notes, “a great number of [minimalist] artists took on the critical responsibility for
explaining their work.”228 “[T]heories of Minimal art, whether relevant to artistic production…or the
spectator/critic‟s apprehension of the object…are central to an understanding of that object,”229 and in
minimalism the reflexivity between theory appears so inextricable that it is often difficult to give one or
the other priority.230 In minimalism we encounter the incipient paradigm of that which Mieke Bal names
the theoretical object – an artwork capable of stimulating, simultaneously, several contradictory responses
in relation to a spectrum of theoretically grounded situations.231
Indeed, what minimalism reveals of the interdependence of the generative and reflexive aspects of poiesis
is significant, and offers a dynamic and aptly minimal model for the operation of an aesthetic movement:
the process by which the occurrence of criticism and artefact imply a progressive clarity in one another.
There can be little doubt that the emergence of a significant and concurrent ancillary, para-aesthetic
complex in relation to minimalism, facilitated its rapid canonization. A network of galleries, institutes,
collectors, journalists, critics and academics quickly set the agenda for an ongoing polemic regarding, in
particular, its status as art,232 its transgressive relation to medium and genre, and its significance in
formalist terms. The leading minimalists were themselves erudite, philosophically astute and articulate
223
Meyer, Minimalism, 33; Marzona, Minimal Art, 11.
MAP, 7.
225
Ibid., 12-24; Meyer, Minimalism, 29;
226
Marzona, Minimal Art, 25.
227
Baker, Minimalism, 17.
228
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 4.
229
Ibid., 5.
230
Strickland, Minimalism, 5.
231
Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002) 185.
232
Amongst the significant art historians and theoreticians who wrote on minimalism in its early years are Richard
Wollheim, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, a group which subsequently included Arthur C. Danto, Lucy
Lippard, Rosalind Krauss and Barbara Rose, almost all of whom contributed to the debate as to whether minimalism
should be understood as art, non-art or anti-art.
224
52
regarding the theoretical implications of their work. 233 Minimalist music – cultivated between the
university classroom,234 the informal but hip spaces of the New York loft scene,235 and performance art
groups such as Fluxus 236 – soon migrated to these gallery settings,237 and, finally, to concert halls.
Here is an epochal moment in the development of American cultural economy: only an art of the most
radical simplicity and immanence seemed equal to the self-sacrificial task of responding to the apparently
constitutive instabilities of postmodernity,238 and this took shape in a public which was increasingly
“persuaded that it was both chic and financially savvy to buy contemporary American art, until the traffic
in art becomes a high-roller‟s game.”239 Those in the arts were unafraid to challenge professional
orthodoxies: Finlay‟s Poor Old Tired Horse offered a ground-breaking platform for concrete poetry;
working with revolutionary stage directors such as Robert Wilson, Glass‟ heavily amplified ensemble has
never bound itself to the traditional concert stage;240 minimalist painters and sculptors dispensed with
both the frame and the plinth, undermining perhaps the principal means of partitioning art from the
commonplace.241 What is reshaped is not only how art is encountered, but its substance – inasmuch as the
latter is distributed between the temporality of perception, locus, the effects of sensation and the essence
or substance of the work. As Danto understands it, “the pedestal upon which art gets put...[which] is a
political translocation as savage as that which turned women into ladies,”242 is thus undone. In other
words, the ideological undercurrent of art‟s physical transformation and distribution amongst formal
institutions is significant. Baker grasps this problem with considerable insight:
An activist impulse to change people‟s attitudes underlies much so-called Minimalist work. This activism
foundered on a contradiction built into the art world: the institutional forces which make art known and
meaningful to the public tacitly assert a hierarchy of values in which power and money predominate, as
does the coercive authority their consolidation requires. Minimalism is a compelling and important episode
in American art because it clarified the fact that artists, despite their ambitions, can only play at superseding
the values by which society‟s ruling groups legitimize their power. At its best, Minimalist art was and is a
plea for commitment to values – such as clear, contemplative vision, the recognition of illusions for what
233
Of the practicing minimalists to have written with subtlety on their and related work are Judd, Stella, Morris,
LeWitt, Nyman, Reich and Mertens.
234
Strickland, Minimalism, 121-2.
235
Potter, Four, 18.
236
Strickland, Minimalism, 140-1, 162; Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and beyond (New York:
Schirmer, 1974), 85-6.
237
Potter, Four, 195, 197-8.
238
Lasch, Minimal Self , 131, 134.
239
Baker, Minimalism, 30. See Marzona, Minimal Art, 25.
240
Potter, Four, 260.
241
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 35-9.
242
Arthur C. Danto, “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art
(New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 12.
53
they are, and a love of physical reality for its own sake – that are not, and probably cannot be, widely
shared in a highly technologized, economically volatile mass society, irrespective of its form of
government.243
Indeed, upon close analysis, canonical minimalism is at least as readily deployed in service of mass
communication as it is in the indifferent realism the present work regards as it truest vocation. Its
aesthetic is rapidly and effectively assimilated into the visual language and soundtrack of advertising and
product design;244 minimalism becomes synonymous with restrained style in architecture, (Figures 19 and
20)245 interior design (Figure 21)246 and fashion (Figure 22);247 its influence on the course of popular
music is significant, from the hypnotic riffs of much 1970s rock to Marnie Stern‟s recent This Is It and I
Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That (Track 4),248
and from the disco of the late 1970s249 to the minimal electronica of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music),
exemplified in the work of composers such as Plastikman (Track 5).250
Figure 19: Dirk Jan Postel, Glass House in Almelo.
243
Figure 20: Morger & Degelo, House in Dornach.
Baker, Minimalism, 30.
Strickland, 2-3, 9; Fink, 13, 120-8; Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 96.
245
Respectively Dirk Jan Postel, Glass House (date unspecified). Almelo, Netherlands; Morger & Degelo, House
(date unspecified). Dornach, Switzerland. See Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 72-81; 97-107.
246
Gluckman Mayner, Helmut Lang Flagship Parfumerie, 1997. New York. See Cheviakoff, 126-55.
247
Francisco Costa (for Calvin Klein), Dress, Pre-fall, 2011/12. MAP, 24-39; Strickland, 1; Schwartz, 10.
248
Marnie Stern, “Steely,” This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It
and That Is That. Kill Rock Starts, 2008.
249
Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 9, 26-30, 35-42 .
250
Plastikman, “Psyk,” Artifakts. Novamute, 1998.
244
54
Figure 21: Gluckman Mayner, Helmut Lang Flagship
Parfumerie, New York, 1997.
Figure 22: Francisco Costa (for Calvin Klein),
Pre-fall, 2011/12.
Inasmuch as there is manifested a minimal look251 – a stylistic, aesthetic immediacy, as well as the marker
for an existential containment and austerity which promises the most by way of the least – we ought
immediately, and more cynically, also to recognize in its operation a “characteristic repetitive experience
of self in mass-media consumer society...[T]he rationalized techno-world that began to take final shape in
industrialized societies during the long post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s created for the first time
the theoretical possibility of a strange feedback loop”252 to which minimalism in a sense attests.
Minimalism is all too easily recuperated in support of hegemonic social structures. This point is at the
heart of Anna C. Chave‟s vehement criticism of minimalism, directed at what she interprets as its
“domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric.”253 Where Greenberg disapproves of the conceptualism of
minimalism, and Fried criticizes it for its theatricality, Chave attacks it for the sheer physicality of its
taking-place. In her view, “the authority implicit in the identity of the materials and shapes the artists
used, as well as in the scale and often the weight of their objects,”254 “effectually perpetrat[ing] violence
251
MAP, 24; Cheviakoff, Minimal Art, 82.
Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 4.
253
Chave, Rhetoric of Power, 26.
254
Ibid., 25.
252
55
through their work – violence against the conventions of art and against the viewer – rather than using
their visual language to articulate a more pointed critique of particular kinds or instances of violence.”255
Chave‟s real target, however, is the ostensible neutrality of minimalism towards questions of political256
and especially gendered power. She believes that it imports covertly all the trappings of patriarchal,
masculinist discourse, both formally and in the terms it deploys in relation to its work. 257 That the
majority of minimalist critics are women is of little interest to her,258 and, more significantly, she seems
unaware that her reading of gender is itself deeply heterosexist. In this respect, we might look to Fink‟s
study which exhibits a more subtle understanding of the implicit relation in minimalism not merely of
gender to power, but also of power and aesthetic telos to sexuality.
4. THE AESTHETICS AND OBJECTS OF MINIMALISM
a) Formalism and objecthood
The admirable clarity and detail of Frances Colpitt‟s 1990 study, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective,
stems principally from her insight that a flexible, analytical formalism best exposes the qualities of
minimalist objects which, by their quantitative presence, habitually render their elaboration in terms of
meaning extremely difficult. Colpitt thus limits her study to the “abstract, geometric painting and
sculpture executed in the United States in the 1960s.”259 Form makes itself known through the actual
existential intensity of an artwork – the objecthood of an object, in which case appearance is reality.
Minimalist sculptural forms constitute such intensities by their radicalization of ordinary sculptural space.
Carl Andre‟s floor-pieces (Figure 23)260 “succeed[...] in squeezing out sculptural space to the point of two
dimensionality,” Colpitt suggests, while Sol LeWitt‟s open cubic structures at once extrapolate and
contain space by virtue of form (Figure 24).261
255
Ibid., 30.
See Batchelor, Minimalism, 71.
257
Chave, Rhetoric of Power, 32-3. See Batchelor, Minimalism, 8.
258
Ibid., 13.
259
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 1.
260
Carl Andre, Fall, 1968. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
261
Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
256
56
Figure 23: Carl Andre, Fall, 1968.
Figure 24: Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974.
57
It is to a similar formal intensity that painter Frank Stella refers, as it is mentioned above, in claiming of
his painting that “only what can be seen there is there…What you see is what you see.”262 Examining
Tomlinson Court Park (Figure 25),263 one of the Black Paintings produced by Frank Stella between 1958
and 1959, it becomes evident how minimalism is poised between the formalist tradition of Bauhaus, De
Stijl and constructivism on the one hand, and the colour field monochromatic tradition of abstract
expressionism264 on the other – the latter exemplified best in the work of Newman, Rothko, Klein and
Reinhardt (Figures 26-29).265 In Stella‟s work, place266 is abstracted to shape – the work containing itself
in its most essential geometric and, moreover, chromatic qualities. The central formal concern of the work
is “the relationship of [its]...internal structure and its bounding shape,” which in this case is the canvas.
However, as Meyer notes,267 this relationship is itself tense. “Forc[ing] the picture (or depicted shape) into
near coincidence with the picture support (or literal shape),”268 Stella‟s work undertakes an uneasy
negotiation of literalism – expressed in the artist‟s desire to “to keep the paint as good as it was in the
can”269 – and illusionism – for, when we regard the work carefully, there is considerable dynamism
depending upon which area, line or space our focus falls. In the movement it exhibits from the edge of the
canvas towards the elongated central rectangle, the formal properties of the painting demonstrate what
Fried describes as a “deductive structure:” the shape of the canvas determines the movement of the
shrinking rectangular shapes towards the centre. Equally, these rectangles race outward, pointing toward
the corners of the canvas and beyond, thus perpetuating the disjunction between the pictorial plane and
that of the wall, despite the absence of a frame. From certain perspectives the expansion and contraction
of these rectangles also acquires depth: the central rectangle at once draws the viewer towards an
unspecified depth – an objectal instantiation of infinite regress, perhaps – and also presents the apex of a
pyramidal structure as viewed from above.
262
Frank Stella in Glaser, “Questions,” 158.
Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park, 1959. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
264
Baker emphasizes that much minimalism appears to be a “classicizing reaction against the Romantic exuberance
and self-celebration of 1950s Abstract Expressionism” (Baker, Minimalism, 13). Also see ibid., 29-31; Strickland,
Minimalism, 24; Colpitt, Minimal Art, 1.
265
Barnett Newman, cathedra, 1971. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Yves Klein, IKB 82, 1959. Guggenheim
Museum, New York; Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958. Tate, London; Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, Black
(A), 1954-9. Virginia Dwan Collection, New York.
266
It may be argued that place is already a conceptual abstraction for the purposes of presentation of an actual
physical location.
267
Meyer, Minimalism, 121-4.
268
Foster, Return, 78.
269
Frank Stella in Glaser, “Questions,” 157.
263
58
Figure 25: Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park, 1959.
Figure 26: Barnett Newman, cathedra, 1971.
59
Figure 27: Yves Klein, IKB 82, 1959.
Figure 28: Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon,
1958.
Figure 29: Ad
Reinhardt, Abstract
Painting Black (A), 1954-9.
That we “understand the object better on its – the object‟s – own terms,”270 is central to the minimalist
vision. It is the aesthetic commitment to objecthood which encompasses considerations of form and
abstraction in minimalism. “The rejection of mimesis and reference, and concomitant emphasis on
materiality, led artists and critics to the notion of objecthood,”271 observes Colpitt. “To refer to the work
of art as an object…meant that it was a nonrepresentational, concrete, and real thing existing in the world,
without illusion or formal prototype.”272 My contention is that the emergence of minimalist objects qua
their objecthood can finally only be apprehended in an existential self-relation which emerges by the
immanent, transformatory logic of transumption. Nonetheless, it is profitable to examine the most notable
of the numerous and imperfect techniques employed in the pursuit of objecthood.
270
Bal, Travelling Concepts, 8. As Bal recognizes, “by selecting an object, you question a field...[T]ogether, object
and methods can become a new, not firmly delineated field” (ibid., 4).
271
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 107.
272
Ibid.
60
b) Minimal forms and internal relation
For visual artists, principal amongst the techniques by which objecthood is pursued is the reduction of
external and internal relations within the artwork in question. The internal relational elements273 of art
“specify the ordering of pictorial or sculptural parts”274 within the work itself. In minimalism, the
emphasis on nonrelational internal composition stipulates that “individual parts and elements275 play a
subordinate role to the overall form of the work. It is not that elements are necessarily eliminated, but
rather that the idiosyncratic or dynamic relationships between them are expended.” 276 In visual terms, the
clearest instantiation of this principle arrives in monochromatic canvases, exemplified most obviously in
the invariant colour fields of painters such as Brice Marden (Figure 30),277 Robert Mangold, Robert
Ryman and Jo Baer, or, indeed, the earlier generation of Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman.
Such fields of colour contain no parts as such,278 and demonstrate the capacity for unified fields of colour
to reinforce the sense of objecthood for which the minimalist work strives. Yet, we might also consider a
far busier minimalism with respect to nonrelational composition, exhibited in paintings such as Stella‟s
Delaware Crossing (Figure 31).279 The work is composed of a chevron design which, because it is
deployed in perfect symmetry and pointing inwards, serves not to complicate the painting, but to focus the
perceiver‟s attention onto the centre of the canvas, reinforcing, indeed containing, the work in its
singularity.
273
In particular, such internal relations encompass the relation of figure to ground, of the image to the shape of the
canvas or other type of support for the work in question, such as the plinth or base for sculpture, of unity to unity in
sculpture (Colpitt, Minimal Art, 43).
274
Ibid., 41.
275
In the visual arts such parts include the relation of figure to ground, image to shape or type of support of the
work, and of unit to unit in sculpture; in music these might include the structuring forms within which pitches or
voices occur within a specific timeframe to constitute melody, rhythm, harmony and harmonic rhythm.
276
Ibid., 43.
277
Brice Marden, Grove Group I, 1972-3. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
278
Some monochromatic painters do vary the hues of the pigment they use, retaining thus a sense of tonal
movement.
279
Frank Stella, Delaware Crossing, 1961. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
61
Figure 30: Brice Marden, Grove Group I, 1972-3.
Donald Judd explicitly claimed that in his sculpture “the parts are unrelational…[W]hen you start relating
parts…you‟re assuming you have a vague whole…and definite parts, which is all screwed up, because
you should have a definite whole and maybe no parts, or very few” 280 (Figure 32).281 That with which
canonical minimalist sculptors concerned themselves, then, was the creation of autonomous, selfcontained objects.282 In work consisting of more than one part – here we might consider Judd‟s serial
sculptures (Figure 33)283 which consist of identical forms, mostly uniform in colour and material, but
occasionally with variations – the object remains nonrelational in the sense that the relation of unit to unit
is one of a duplication emphasizing quantity rather than any particular qualitative dynamism.
280
Donald Judd in Glaser, Questions, 153-154.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1970. Morton Neumann Collection, Chicago.
282
This view is expressed by sculptor Robert Morris (Strickland, Minimalism, 267).
283
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1990. Collection unspecified.
281
62
Figure 31: Frank Stella, Delaware Crossing, 1961.
Figure 32: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1970.
Figure 33: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1990; first type 1965.
63
Equivalent techniques are observable in minimalist music. La Monte Young‟s Trio284 – a wonderful
exemplar of minimalist containment – is structured by a miniature arch-form285 which is conceived in
such a way as to assure the minimum differentiation between its parts, using the smallest possible number
of notes for its particular structure, thus evidencing the strictest musical symmetry imaginable. A similar
observation can be made of Steve Reich‟s phasing technique (first-used by Terry Riley): two (or more)
instruments/channels begin an identical melody in unison, then gradually shift out of phase at specific
intervals, creating a series of unexpected and gripping melodic and pulse variations. Phasing operates by a
logic of distension rather than containment. Internal parts move against each other, exposing the active,
processual dimension of the work – a cyclical, internal torsion – but finally affirm rather than undermine
the integrity of the composition.
The question of literary nonrelation might be approached from the two rather traditional formal channels
of poetry and of prose. The case for relational containment or convergence is well-made by much
concrete poetry. Aram Saroyan‟s untitled poster-poem (Figure 34),286 which consists solely of an
experimental poietic grapheme, offers a paradigm for a generative act of writing which is significant
without being meaningful. Hansjörg Gappmayr‟s “ver” (Figure 35)287 offers a negative but equally
compelling alternative to this poietic position: that in the top left corner we encounter the prefix ver, “an
inseparable prefix added to German verbs, and nouns and adjectives derived from them, with the idea of
removal, loss, untoward action, using up, change, reversal, etc.”288 suggests that the black block
simultaneously limits and conceals the potentiality of the poem. Behind its impassive bulk it conceals
text, the faintest outlines of which are visible upon close inspection, while itself constituting a rather
intimidating poietic body in response to the injunction of the negative prefix.
284
La Monte Young, Trio for Strings, 1958.
Arch-form involves the gradual and symmetrical addition and then subsequent subtraction of parts, so that the
apex of the arch, the half-way point of the composition, presents the maximum simultaneous number of parts
sounding together. Strickland provides a useful account of the form, performance and reception of the Trio
(Strickland, Minimalism, 119-121).
286
Aram Saroyan, “Untitled poster-poem,” An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, ed. Emmett Williams (New York:
Something Else, 1967), 281. Collection hereafter ACP. As Alexander points out, this poem is formally recognized as
the shortest existing poem (Alexander, Minimalism, 6).
287
Heinz Gappmayr, “ver,” ACP, ed. Williams, 112.
288
Emmett Williams, Editorial note, ibid.
285
64
Figure 34: Aram Saroyan, Untitled poster-poem, 1965-6.
Figure 35: Heinz Gappmayr, ver, 1966.
65
Regarding prose, Hallett suggest that minimalist writing for the most part employs a “blunt,
uncomplicated prose…[and] lack of editorial commentary.”289 The writers to which this might apply are
numerous and diverse: amongst the earliest we might count the realism of Chekhov and, subsequently,
that of Hemingway, but equally we could look to the radical work of the nouveaux romanciers – the plait
of objectivist, generative and self-conscious fictions which mark much of the work of Alain RobbeGrillet, Jean Ricardou, Georges Perec and, in a different sense, that of Maurice Blanchot and Samuel
Beckett, both of whom resist easy categorization. In the Anglo-American context, this aesthetic
parsimony is expressed variously in the work of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thomson and
Charles Bukowski, and in the combinations of blue collar realism, neo-naturalism, blank fiction and
compulsive bourgeois self-consciousness which constitute a minimalist engagement of recent fiction with
the Real. The latter, although eclectic and certainly not a group, might include many works of writers as
diverse as Raymond Carver, Joan Didion, Frederick Barthelme, Gabriel Josipovici, Paul Auster, Amy
Hempel, Mary Robison, Bobby Ann Mason, Richard Kostelanetz, Richard Brautigan, Jay McInerney,
Tobias Wolf, Jerzy Kozinsky, Anne Beattie, Brett Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers, David Markson and Tao
Lin.290
Prose at its sparest undoubtedly suggests a definite reduction in the elaborate structures which govern
earlier fiction. As Foster emphasizes, minimalist reduction should not carelessly be conflated with “the
quotidian, the utilitarian, and the non-artistic”291 as has been the tendency of many over-zealous critics.
Rather, it marks a “reorientation”292 and a “mission of recovery,”293 in the terms of Karen Alexander. By
the manner in which the properties of the everyday manifest in a transformative relation to the internal,
quantitative elements most proper to the medium within which the work is constituted, minimalist prose
habitually functions by a distributive logic.
289
Hallett, Minimalism, 13.
The following provide various lists of writers associable with the minimalist aesthetic: ibid., 4, 10; Herzinger,
Introduction, 8-14, 20-1 (Herzinger‟s argument includes a discussion of the problems associated with considering
the British realists of the 1950s such as C.P. Snow, Margaret Drabble and Kingsley Amis too closely with the
aesthetic of minimalism, ibid., 11-4); Linsey Abrams, “A Maximalist Novelist Looks at Some Minimalist Fiction,”
MFMR, 24-28; Stevenson, “Minimalist Fiction,” 83; Bellamy, “Downpour,” 34-8; Strickland, Minimalism, 3, 12;
McDermott, Austere Style, 1-2. Warren Motte generates a comparable catalogue of French minimalists (Motte,
Small Worlds, 2).
291
Foster, Return, 38.
292
Ibid.
293
Alexander, Minimalism, 8.
290
66
The preference in minimalist narrative for “discontinuous devices, arbitrary and open endings, interplay
of surface details,294 narrative omissions, and anti-linear plots”295 at once permits and complicates the
pursuit of minimalism. The prose tradition is one of considerable formal and generic complexity, and
although minimalism renders its structural intricacies clear on one level, the opacity it retains on another
is necessary if it is to accomplish its mimetic vocation – a maximal realism pursued by minimal means.296
Thus, there appears to be a limit to the degree of minimalism which one might accomplish by stylistic
austerity for a work still to be recognizable as functioning in relation to the conventions of narrative
fiction. Given the situation in which stylistic markers are pushed to their minimal extremes, minimalist
prose accedes to a quantitative logic. Simply put, the conviction with which we assert that a work is
minimalist is intimately related to its scale. Carver is more readily recognizable as a minimalist than is
Alain Robbe-Grillet not primarily for reasons of style,297 but because the prose of the former writing is
characterized by a parsimony unmatched by the latter. Such condensation marks the scale of Carver‟s
work as minimalist – a scale not dependent solely on its brevity, although such brevity certainly assists in
our perception of these as unified works, and in this unity, in turn, resides the capacity of these works to
compel our attention qua their minimalism. An extreme of this quantitative logic is apparent in Richard
Kostelanetz‟s Microstories,298 which, far briefer than Carver‟s work and usually consisting of single
sentences, exceed what is ordinarily comprehensible in terms of narrative prose. This transgression is the
precise consequence of their aphoristic concision: their syntax is proper neither to prose nor to poetry;
radical in that they resemble narrative but, by virtue of their claim to universality, attach to none of the
represented events which are its ordinary consequences.
Examining Carver‟s short fiction, it becomes evident how the case for objecthood in narrative prose is
habitually complicated by the manner in which the internal relation of formal elements (no matter how
limited) and external referentiality appear inseparable.299 Precisely on this mimetic count, critics
294
In this context it is necessary to point out the potential differences between surface and deep structural relations
between units.
295
Ibid., 16.
296
See Danto, Transfiguration, 9, 11-3, 21, 24-5.
297
The austerity of Robbe-Grillet‟s short fiction is at least equal to that of Carver‟s.
298
The following is one of Kostelanetz‟s Microstories in full: “Even the happiest love stories end in death” (Richard
Kostelanetz, “Microstories,” Gander Press Review 1 (2008): 93.
299
This is modelled with particular clarity by Roland Barthes. In Barthes‟ model, narrative exists across three levels:
the functional level – which includes the specific linguistic units from which the “narrative economy” (Roland
Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Image, Music, Text , trans. Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), 97) of plot is constructed (“nuclei [functions proper] and catalysers, indices and informants” (ibid,.
96-7)); the actional level – the aspects of character or actants (ibid., 105) which bring about change or “major
articulations of praxis” (ibid., 107) by coordinating functional units (ibid., 107); and the narrative – the highest level
67
periodically attempt to classify Carver as a realist rather than a minimalist – Verhoeven offers numerous
alternatives, and Hilfer emphasises in Carver‟s work a “reflex to lower-class exigency”300 above a
particular aesthetic vision. As do Hallett301 and Alexander,302 we ought to recall that minimalism has
always concerned itself with intensifying the Real, which justifies Schechner‟s claim that Carver‟s work
is a catalyst for the realist revival in 1980s fiction,303 expressing “a capacity for seeing clearly and the
power to create, in prose, the illusion of a sharply visualised world.”304 Fluck characterizes realist
literature as writing “intent on arresting semantic play by insisting on the need of life-likeness and
verisimilitude in representation.”305 In the best of Carver‟s minimalism, writing presents “an effective
illusion of reality,”306 generated – as in the case of Stella‟s painting – within the tension which persists
between illusionism and factical materiality.
In “The bath”, for example, Carver‟s terse, dispassionate and fractured narrative captures with
considerable subtlety the emotional complex and communicative disjuncture which might accompany
traumatic experience. Recounting an accident in which a boy is run down by a car on the eve of his eighth
birthday, and the vigil of his parents at his hospital bed, Carver reflects the full distress of the incident in
the devastating obliqueness of the mothers‟ fractured monologue which she recites upon encountering
complete strangers in a hospital waiting room:
My son was hit by a car...But he‟s going to be all right. He‟s in shock now, but it might be some kind of a
coma too. That‟s what worries us, the coma part. I‟m going out for a little while. Maybe I‟ll take a bath.
But my husband is with him. He‟s watching. There‟s a chance everything will change when I‟m gone. My
307
name is Ann Weiss.
Although the aesthetic of minimalist prose manifests principally in terms of a radical reduction of “form,
style, vocabulary, syntax, imagery, structure, plot, and characterisation,”308 analysis reveals that the
at which the functional and actional levels are integrated and the narrative is opened to the world for interpretation
(ibid., 115).
300
Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1992), 182.
301
Hallett, Minimalism, 15-7.
302
Alexander, Minimalism, 136-7.
303
Mark Schechner, “American Realisms, American Realities,” Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction,
ed. Kristiaan Versluys (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992), 40.
304
Ibid., 43.
305
Winfried Fluck, “Surface and Depth: Postmodernism and Neo-Realist Fiction,” Neo-Realism, 69.
306
Ibid.
307
Raymond Carver, “The bath,” The Stories of Raymond Carver (London: Picador, 1985), 219.
308
Verhoeven, “Much ado,” 43-4.
68
condensation of its internal relations is only contingent, and that the minimalist work exposes a particular
set of external relations.
c) Poietic immanence – impassive presence, repetition, and the demands minimalism makes of its
perceiver
Much as minimalism moves across the conventions of modern and postmodern aesthetics, so, too, does its
concern with absolute autonomy and an increasingly active mode of aesthetic perception which such
autonomy paradoxically demands. While the limited internal relations by which the minimalist artwork is
most unambiguously confirmed habitually appeal to an existential logic of containment, it is not
uncommon that this internality turns upon itself – revealing a dynamism unanticipated in the object in
question, which the present work recognizes in terms of distension – or turns outward – a process of
transumption, in which the dislocation of an object‟s most essential quantity is at once a relocation of the
same.
Treating such externality in formalist terms, numerous critics recognize that a radicalization of the
constructive nature of perception is minimalism‟s most consistent feature. Colpitt suggests that in
minimalism we discover “a new focus on relationships struck across and within the space between the
spectator and the object of perception.”309 The consequences of this relationship are by no means
unambiguous, however. In Art and Objecthood Michael Fried holds that intrinsic to minimalism is its
theatricality – fundamentally detrimental to the fortunes of art310 – which derives directly from his
understanding that literalist311 objects deprive the perceiver of the capacity not to respond to them:312
“inasmuch as the literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting
for him.”313 As Michael‟s notes, “in Fried‟s account of Minimalism, the object exists on its own all right;
what depends on the beholder is only the experience. But of course, the experience is everything – it is the
experience instead of the object that Minimalism values.”314 Yet to the extent that the general minimalist
programme asserts that the aesthetic object is equal, rather than superior, to the perceiver, Fried‟s
309
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 67.
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 141-2.
311
See pages 245-52 of the present work.
312
Michaels, Shape, 88.
313
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 140.
314
Michaels, Shape, 89.
310
69
argument tends towards overstatement. Indeed, as Foster emphasizes, “minimalism considers perception
in phenomenological terms, as somehow before or outside history, language, sexuality, and power.”315
The external relations of minimalist artwork encompass the manner in which such an artwork exists in a
particular spatial and temporal complex and, moreover, in relation to the perceiver. A chief concern of
minimalism is presence – the immanence of an object, intrinsically and in relation to its environment. The
significant force of such presence arises from the concurrency of affect and effect in minimalism‟s most
significant works. Colpitt contends that “there are no exhibited, formal clues to signal the existence of
presence, since it is felt, responded to, rather than recognised.”316 Presence, in this light, offers itself as an
oblique aesthetic contract between object and perceiver, at once a testimony to the radical, impassive,
quantitative dimension of Being – the Real – and the manner in which the Real renders itself intelligible
through minimal aesthetic objects which reach out into the experiential world.
In Fried‟s estimation,317 minimalists “want[…] to achieve presence through objecthood, which requires a
certain largeness of scale, rather than through size alone.”318 In minimalism, however, acknowledging the
spatial and temporal particularities of perception draws us towards, rather than away from, the objecthood
of the work. In musical minimalism, presence is conveyed principally by the immediacy achieved in
works which use sustained drones – the work of La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Brian Eno, Harold
Budd and Richard Maxfield typify this approach – or various types of intense repetition – Philip Glass,
Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and John Adams for whom this technique offers an active means of structuring
the music.319 By these techniques, composers reduce to a minimum the interval between the production,
reception and consequent perception and processing of, and reflection upon, the music in question.
Variation takes on a far more subtle and ateleological role in this context, ensuring between the
composition as sonic object, and the immanence with which the perceiver experiences the composition, a
remarkable continuity.
The minimalist concern with presence relates closely to what in traditional aesthetics is marked in terms
of the sublime: an immediacy of experience which commands attention precisely by threatening to
overwhelm the integrity of the senses.320 Thus, common to Robert Wilson‟s remarkable design for Glass‟
315
Foster, Return, 43.
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 70.
317
He refers here specifically to the work of Morris, but the statement holds true for the majority of Minimalist art.
318
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 126.
319
Fink, Repeating, 5-8.
320
Kant, Judgment, 115.
316
70
opera Einstein on the Beach321 (Figure 36), Dan Flavin‟s installation at the Dan Flavin Art Institute
(Figure 37),322 Olafur Eliasson‟s The Weather Project (Figure 38)323 and Walter de Maria‟s Lightning
Field (Figure 39)324 is not only a minimalist understanding of light, natural or manufactured, as sculptural
medium, but of minimalist light art as evoking an experience of sublime presence.
Figure 36: Robert Wilson, Part of stage design for Einstein on the Beach, 1976.
321
Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, 1975.
Dan Flavin, untitled (to Robert, Joe and Michael), 1975-81. Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton.
323
Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Tate Modern, London.
324
Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field, 1971-7. Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico.
322
71
Figure 37: Dan Flavin, untitled (to Robert, Joe and Michael), Figure 38: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project,
1975-81.
2003.
Figure 39: Walter de Maria, The Lighting Field, 1971-7.
72
Intimately related in minimalism to the notion of presence is that of scale, or the relative quantitative
relation of an artwork to the perceiver and its environment.325 “Like presence, the ingredients of scale
cannot be prescribed.”326 In minimalism, the appropriate scale for a work is the one which maximises the
immanence of its objecthood. In all four works of light art above, the scale is, as it were, maximally
minimal. This is the case despite the fact that the scale of De Maria‟s work is enormous – four hundred
steel poles, each over twenty feet tall, act as lightning conductors arranged over a mile-by-kilometre area
in New Mexico, harnessing and distributing massive amounts of electrical energy 327 – whereas the scale
of Flavin‟s work is comparably moderate, although no less aesthetically forceful, measured as it is by the
room in which the fixtures are situated, and transmuting modest amounts of energy into a quite
overwhelming yellow and violet luminescence.
Minimalist music generates through sustained pitches, relentless repetition or considerable duration a
“sublime excess of teleology,”328 which not only neutralizes any conventional telos but abandons the
anthropocentric scale by which classical music is traditionally structured according to the “timescale of
individual (or cumulative) arcs of tension and release.”329 Evidence of this new approach to musical scale
is offered in the indefinite duration of La Monte Young‟s The Well-Tuned Piano (Track 6),330 the five
hours of Philip Glass‟ opera Einstein on the Beach, or the three and a half hours of his Music in Twelve
Parts.331 Yet even apparently smaller works exhibit a similarly impactful distensive logic: in Steve
Reich‟s Four Organs (Track 7)332 “four electronic organs repeat the pitches of a single chord, gradually
extending them so that, while the pulse remains intact, the music gives the impression of slowing
down.”333 The scale of the work is distinct not so much for its pure duration, but for the manner in which
it transforms the human experience of duration.
Proposing a parallel poetics between minimalism and the short story on the basis of scale, Hallett suggests
that “both minimalism and the short story privilege the singular, focus on surface images, and speak
sparingly…[B]oth have been subjected to the worst sort of literary bias: accused of lacking capacity and
325
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 75.
Ibid., 77.
327
Baker, Minimalism, 125-6.
328
Fink, Repeating, 44.
329
Ibid.
330
La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano, 1964-present. The full recorded version is five hours long.
331
Philip Glass, Music in Twelve Parts, 1971-4.
332
Steve Reich, Four Organs. Nonesuch, 1996.
333
Potter, Four, 200.
326
73
substance.”334 Hallett claims for minimalist literature a particular clarity in its capacity for presenting
“concrete details which reflect complex states of being and which correlate with elements of the universal
human condition.”335 Indeed, in the attempt to grasp the quantitative dimension by which the perceiving
subject belongs to a potentially universal configuration, we glimpse the considerable significance of the
minimalist concern with scale.
d) Minimalism between
nonanthropomorphism
index
and
indifference
–
nonreferentiality,
nonmediation,
Supporting the minimalist concern with presence is its preference for producing nonreferential objects. In
the case of minimalist transumption, the centrality of displacement and transformation invariably results
in a struggle for dominance between hetero- and self-reference. Thus, considering several of the
manifestations of the sun-god Apollo in the environments of Ian Hamilton Finlay‟s concrete poetry, we
discover that the god has “migrated far from his native Greece; he is the pale „Hyperborean Apollo‟
visiting the northern regions, of whom Heine and Pater write. His modern avatar is the French
revolutionary, Saint-Just.”336 Encountering upon a wooded path at Little Sparta337 the imposing golden
head of the sun-God – glowing, as it might be expected to, but upon its forehead inscribed the title
Apollon Terroriste (Figure 40)338 – we are subject to a remarkable experience of theoretical and historical
convergence; the “disjunction of disorder and coherence,”339 as Alec Finlay has suggested, which is yet a
“model of order.”340 For here is not only Apollo, but also an architect of the French Revolution, SaintJust, who makes frequent appearances in Finlay‟s work: 341 the classical and neo-classical, bucolic and
political, generative and destructive, are held in a stimulating proximity.342
334
Hallett, Minimalism, 20-1.
Ibid., 47.
336
Stephen Bann, “The Temple,” Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion, 1992),
65. See Stephen Scobie, Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry
(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997), 176-7.
337
Little Sparta is the name Finlay gave to his garden at Stonypath, near Edinburgh, where he lived and worked for
over 38 years, and at where the majority of his concrete and landscape poetry is rehearsed.
338
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Apollon Terroriste, 1988. Little Sparta, Dunsyre.
339
Alec Finlay, “Introduction,” Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry, Art and Gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay,
ed. Alec Finlay (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1997), xv.
340
Finlay, Model, 22.
341
John Dixon Hunt, Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Reaktion, 2008), 113.
342
Ibid., 110, 114-5; Abrioux, Visual Primer, 252-3; Scobie, Earthquakes, 171-8.
335
74
Figure 40: Ian Hamilton Finlay with Alexander Stoddart, Apollon Terroriste, 1988.
75
Their harmony is a paradoxical one: Apollo is associated not only with light, truth, revelation, learning
and creative endeavour, but also with the manner in which these dialectically contain their own antitheses.
Thus also with Saint-Just: the revolutionary is at once the instrument of enlightenment and terror.343
Revelation and revolution, intimately linked, are easily consumed by an instrumental application of terror;
truth slips back into dogma, and art only scarcely contains the savage, sublime 344 forces and violence by
which it is generated. It is not by chance that Saint-Just‟s golden head should be disembodied, as the
promise of the revolution succumbs all too rapidly to the extremities of its own logic, and its progenitors
meet the same fate at the foot of the guillotine which they expedited for so many others. Thus it is stylistic
and historical discontinuity, rather than thematic disunity, which strikes us in the statuette of
Apollo/Saint-Just (Figure 41)345 carrying a machine-gun,346 as well as in the inscription which appears on
the facade of Finlay‟s Garden Temple (Figure 42):347 “TO APOLLO, HIS MUSIC, HIS MISSILES, HIS
MUSES.”348 Finlay‟s concrete poetry offers minimal, yet potent, markers of historical, spatial and cultural
transposition,349 indeed, transumption. In the singularity of their location, these objects act as indices:
minimalist poietic markers which render deeply problematic the understanding that intense selfreflexivity passes most readily into non-referentiality.
Nonetheless, it is still accurate that in much minimalism, self-reflexivity is of so intense an order that,
contra the processes observable in much of Finlay‟s concrete poetry, the aesthetic object does in fact
eschew all external and mimetic reference. “[R]eleased from representation, they further remove
themselves from allusion by their being new and unique objects, referring to nothing (except, some might
argue, to the theories upon which they are based).”350 Despite numerous superficial resemblances,
minimalists habitually reject the principles of traditional abstraction – of an “art whose forms have a basis
in the real world.”351 Identifying in its objects the persistence and indifference of the Real, minimalism
pursues its unmediated realness by a vigorous eschewal of mimesis.352 Shape and form are means of
conceptual and formal deduction rather than the imitation of something pre-existent. Similarly,
343
Abrioux, Visual Primer, 251-2, 255-7, 260, 265; Hunt, Nature 109-10, 113-4, 117-8; Jessie Sheeler, Little
Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Francis Lincoln, 2003), 65-9; See Finlay, Model, 35.
344
Abrioux, Visual Primer, 250-1; Hunt, Nature; 117-8.
345
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Apollo/Saint-Just, 1986. Little Sparta, Dunsyre.
346
Abrioux, Visual Primer, 116; Sheeler, Little Sparta, 69.
347
Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Garden Temple (To Apollo, His Music, His Missiles, His Muses), 1982. Little Sparta,
Dunsyre.
348
See Sheeler, Little Sparta, 65.
349
Ibid.
350
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 102.
351
Ibid., 101.
352
Ibid., 71.
76
anthropomorphism – the comprehension of parts, properties and the relation between these with reference
to that which is manifestly human – is “displaced in this art (Minimalism) by the nonanthropomorphic
quality of „presence,‟”353 discussed above.
Figure 41: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Apollo/Saint-Just
(after Bernini), 1986.
Figure 42: Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Garden Temple
(To Apollo, His Music, His Missiles, His Muses), 1982.
The condition implied by an ideal and dynamic combination of appropriate scale, presence and
nonanthropomorphism is nonreferentiality – the artwork is free to exist in relation to its own objecthood
or, otherwise, in terms of its essential quantity. Critics and artists disagree on the extent and desirability of
minimalism‟s nonreferentiality, yet habitually acknowledge its significance: Fried proposes a deductive
logic in minimalism according to which “the shape is the object;”354 Wollheim asserts that “the identity of
a work…resides in the actual stuff in which it consists;”355 Robert Morris‟ unitary forms and Donald
Judd‟s specific objects offer integral visions of nonreferentiality from the perspective of the object
itself.356 The unity and wholeness of such objects is pursued by various techniques of construction. In
music, for example, both drones and repetitive modules draw attention to limitation in order to render the
353
Ibid., 70.
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 119.
355
Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” 391.
356
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 110.
354
77
work more perceivable and thus effective in terms of its integrity and structural unity (Track 8).357
Analogical techniques of repetition are observable in the serial (Figure 43)358 and modular sculpture
(Figure 44)359 of such artists as Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Mel Bochner, and in the hard edge painting
of Ellsworth Kelly (Figure 45)360 or series of Brice Marden and Paul Mogensen (Figure 46).361 Kelly‟s
work consists of repeated (usually) vertical bands or panels of highly contrasted colour, to which Judd
ascribes “some…earlier purity, idealism, and oblique but directly descriptive reference to nature.”362
Strickland highlights the unifying function of Kelly‟s repetition, which he associates with the immediacy
evoked by the formal and chromatic interruption between these panels,363 and their significance in
exploiting the effectiveness of replication within modular patterns of structural uniformity.364
Figure 43: Sol LeWitt, Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD), 1966.
357
Philip Glass, “Rubric,” Glassworks. CBS, 1982. Glass skilfully exposes the manner in which a composition‟s
form and the audible process of its formation render one another increasingly transparent.
358
Sol LeWitt, Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD), 1966. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
359
Donald Judd, Untitled series, 1982-6. Chinati Foundation, Marfa.
360
Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum IV (1967). Here is a concise presentation of several of minimalism‟s key concerns.
Kelly‟s work is a serial painting composed of thirteen vertical panels, each of a different colour, which together
constitute a displaced by nonetheless legitimate chromatic series – the panels do not run from red to blue, the usual
order of the spectrum. In horizontal sequence, revealing an unexpected symmetry, the vertical bands of the work
demonstrates the minimalist proclivity for formal repetition as well as an emphasis on process, both in the use of the
spectrum – a progressive sequence in the scientific sense of chromatic frequency – and in the manner in which
horizontal sequencing suggest temporal process.
361
Paul Mogensen, Copperopolis, 1966. Collection unspecified.
362
Donald Judd, “Young Artists at the Fair and at Lincoln Centre,” Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax and New
York: Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975), 130.
363
Strickland, Minimalism,73.
364
Ibid., 70-71.
78
Figure 44: Donald Judd, Untitled series (North Artillery Shed,
Marfa), 1982-6.
Figure 46: Paul Mogensen, Copperopolis, 1966.
Figure 45:Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum IV, 1967.
79
Repetition is similarly pivotal to the pursuit of a minimalist literary aesthetic. It finds of its most intense
expressions in Gertrude Stein‟s circuitous and cyclical writing with its emphasis on wordness – the
“satisfaction in language made present, contemporary; the pleasure/plenitude in the immersion in
language, where language is not understood as a code for something else or a representation of
somewhere else.”365 Equally we might look to the example of Beckett whose “work, with its asymptotic
approaches to zero, enacts this complex play between reduction and addition, in which to repeat oneself,
and therefore to say progressively less, seems, uncannily always to involve saying more.” 366 Modular
repetition – often replete with incremental additions and subtractions, and constructed from phrases
making use of various techniques of contraction, elaboration, reversal, inversion or displacement – is
central to the writing of Beckett and such other writers as Robbe-Grillet and Josipovici. The “voice...in
the dark”367 provides a central module in Beckett‟s “Company,” the permutations of which allow one to
trace a vigorous play of existential limits within the work – between internality and externality; active and
passive voice; first, second and third person narrative368 – as well as the recollection of largely traumatic
childhood memories. In Josipovici‟s The Inventory entire passages are repeated,369 reflecting on the
manner in which conceptual chunking and repetitive narrative units often implicate one another. Similar
use of repetition is recognizable in Didion‟s prose,370 and in the writing of that “stylistic genitor of
contemporary minimalist prose,”371 Ernest Hemingway.
Repetition is more clearly integral to the structure and coherence of much traditional as well as avantgarde poetry. Nonetheless, a particularly minimalist conception of repetition is most convincingly
exhibited in some of the finest Concrete and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. By its repetition, Eugen
Gomringer‟s “silence” evokes the symmetry which exists between textual, semantic and material
presence and absence:
365
Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1992), 143.
Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Blackwell: Oxford, 1988), 11.
367
Samuel Beckett, “Company,” Nohow On (New York: Grove, 1996), 3.
368
Ibid., 7.
369
We might consider the You’re early (Gabriel Josipovici, The Inventory (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), 27-8,
35) and the old man in the rocking-chair sequences in this regard (ibid., 45, 55, 57, 58).
370
Didion‟s repetition reflects the compulsive element of social interaction and dogma, as well as a notable
destitution in contemporary communication (Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer (London: Penguin, 1979), 30;
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 28-30).
371
Hallett, Minimalism, 37.
366
80
silence
silence
silence
silence
silence
silence silence
silence silence
silence
silence silence
372
silence silence
If the word silence were not repeated as relentlessly as it is in Gomringer‟s poem – admitting that every
iteration effectively negates the immanence of the word‟s meaning – then it is unlikely that its absence at
the poem‟s physical centre could match the absence which is its semantic heart, that is, silence.
Fluctuating between the genres of prose poem and artist‟s book,373 the work of Steve McCaffery is
equally significant with respect to repetition. At the close of the third part of Panopticon374 we encounter
the phrase “and on” repeated no less than four hundred and forty times (Figure 47). The visual effect is as
startling as the manner in which this repetition elicits from us a recognition of the materiality of text.
Whether reading these lines, which for their sheer quantity dissolve the semantic element which precedes
them, or apprehending them in purely visual terms, we encounter text in increasingly preconceptual,
independent and objectal terms.
372
Eugen Gomringer, “silence,” Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology, ed. Stephen Bann (London: London
Magazine Editions, 1967), 31. This poem has been anthologized elsewhere as silencio. Anthology hereafter CPIA.
373
Marjorie Perloff, Inner Tension/In Attention: Steve McCaffery’s Book Art. 20 November 2011.
<http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/ mccaf.html>.
374
Steve McCaffery, “From Panopticon,” From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990,
ed. Douglas Messerli (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1994), 1024-1025.
81
Figure 47: Steve McCaffery, from Panopticon, 1984.
The writing of Robert Lax is also notably innovative for the manner in which, by repetition, it aims to
return to the poietic constituents of a given work a sense of radical immanence:
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is
is375
375
Robert Lax, “is,” New Poems 1962/1985 (London: Coracle, 1986), 13.
82
Lax‟s poem exemplifies the manner in which repetition and presence are often confluent in minimalism,
emphasizing a poietic taking-place as the very heart of the work – that transcendental immanence is most
proper to every entity by virtue simply of its occurrence. Such is the “innermost exteriority” 376 by which
aesthetic objects reflect the minimal displacement from themselves by which they acquire a poietic
existential valence:
things
into
words
words
into
things
things
into
words
words
into
things
words
into
things
words
into
things
things
into
words
words
into
things377
e) The problem of reduction and the questions of facture and process
As noted, critical models attempting to conflate minimalism and reductivism remain problematic
inasmuch as they fail to distinguish with suitable clarity radical simplicity from one arrived at as the telos
376
377
CC, 15.
Robert Lax, “things into words,” New Poems, 42.
83
of a reductive process. In recognizing minimalisms of unit, form, scale, style and material,378 John Barth
offers a sufficiently open typology of minimalism, but one which rests heavily upon this conflation. This
is also true of the nine principal characteristics of minimalist literature379 which Hallett identifies,
concluding that minimalism offers “containers of condensed meaning”380 in which we are obliged to
“infer from the part exposed exactly what has been omitted, what lies beneath.” 381 Where the part is
metonymic in minimalist literature, in the visual arts it is independent. Colpitt contends that “while
simplicity implies an intentionally reductive process…it does not demand it. For many artists there is a
difference between the conception of a work of art as simple and the process of reducing from complexity
to arrive at that simplicity.”382 In light of this important recognition, the extremity of reduction which
seems evident in minimalism sui generis is as much the product of hermeneutic expectations and
analytical processes traceable to the perceiver, as to the preference for “using materials as they...[are],
without adulteration.”383 According to Colpitt, “simplification or reduction are conceptual…[I]f elements
were to be eliminated, they were done so in the artist‟s mind.”384 Tracing minimalism qua reduction is
thus a manner of regenerating in the aesthetic work an act of and active perception – constructively
paying attention, in the spirit noted by Merleau-Ponty.385
The questions of where, of what and how an artwork is constituted – in short, questions of facture – are of
considerable significance to the development of canonical minimalism. By abandoning the fetishization
of the generative ritual, minimalism also forgoes numerous of the outward signs of artistic facture – its
technical irregularities, expressiveness and gestures. Minimalists seek maximally stable and impersonal
techniques through which to produce their works. This is particularly evident in minimalist sculpture
which, along with the mechanical, anonymous reproduction of Pop art, “rejected personal facture.” 386
Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Anne Truitt all used media unconventional for their art – sheet metal and
plywood for example – which benefited from the expertise of industrial fabrication, providing works with
378
Barth, “Few Words,” 68. See Alexander, Minimalism, 9-11.
These are, in brief: uncomplicated prose; compactness which encompasses universal concerns; dialogical over
auctorial or narrational exposition; non-heroic, everyday characters; absence of narrative climax; a sense of
impotence regarding intentional action and communication; recognition of the inadequacy of language; passivity
with regard to the passage of time and event; relativism (Hallett, Minimalism, 25).
380
Ibid., 11.
381
Ibid., 9.
382
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 114.
383
Ibid., 114.
384
Ibid., 115.
385
See page 251 of the present.
386
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 17.
379
84
an increased “sharpness and clarity of edge and surface.”387 Thus at least some minimalism appears to
move towards an aesthetic situation which “evince[s] a „minimum‟ of artistic labour…purging...authorial
feeling and demonstratable intention.”388 The reasons for abandoning the physical labour of sculptural
construction, preferring industrial fabrication and assemblage, thus seem quite as practical as they are
aesthetic.389
For many minimalist sculptors, the sheer scale of work (Figure 48),390 the incredible heaviness of
material,391 and the use of premanufactured objects392 required an unprecedented cooperation between
artists, manufacturers and various specialists in industrial construction and installation. That “the artist
functioned as conceptualizer; the factory as the actualizer”393 provoked some dissent amongst critics.394
Fried and Greenberg were less than hospitable to the idea, although as Colpitt emphasizes, it was
principally New York Times critic, Hilton Kramer, who, in deeply Romantic rather than anti-minimalist
terms, lamented the sacrifice of “the energy and genius of [the artist‟s] own hand”395 to various
technologies of reproduction, a position immediately and effectively countered by Dore Ashton.396
387
Ibid., 18.
MAP, 3.
389
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 16-8; 20-2; MAP, 8.
390
Ronald Bladen, The X , 1967. Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. The sculpture measures 22 by 24 by 14 feet.
391
Richard Serra uses lead for many of his sculptures.
392
Dan Flavin‟s light art is almost all constructed from prefabricated fluorescent tubes.
393
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 16.
394
Colpitt and Meyer agree that critics quickly accepted and assimilated the precepts of minimalism (ibid., 21-2;
MAP, 3), although Meyer suggests that the purchase histories of various works suggests that the hostility of the
general public was more long-lasting (ibid., 271).
395
Hilton Kramer, qtd. in Colpitt, Minimal Art, 21-2.
396
Ibid.
388
85
Figure 48: Ronald Bladen, The X, 1967.
It is simply naive to imagine any form of artistic expression as entirely disconnected from technology, be
it in terms of the means or the medium of production.397 Minimalism‟s reliance on fabrication over artistic
facture might, by some, be interpreted cynically as the point at which the utopianism of modernity tips
into the dystopianism of postmodernity: creative force appears to be displaced, first from genius to
technique, then from technique to technology, generating a rupture in which the potential for true novelty
collapses into a void of simulacra. Yet, perhaps unexpectedly, minimalism in fact resists this collapse: its
simultaneously radical and materialist approach offers clarity on the manner in which various techniques
of fabrication cross into art. The manner of its complication of simulacra, and its accompanying
problematization of the Real, extends well beyond the concerns exposed above in terms of sculpture, and
into other aesthetic pursuits. In minimalist painting, a similar interest in the withdrawal of facture is
397
Consider in this respect the technological advances which were necessary for the modern pianoforte to develop
from its predecessors – the Medieval hurdy-gurdy, the Renaissance and Baroque harpsichord and clavichord, the
Classical fortepiano – and the exponentially accelerating and interactive effects on the development of formal
structures, techniques, proficiency and stylistic idiosyncrasies, in terms of both composition and performance
engendered by such technology (and which music and performance, in turn, demand more advanced instruments).
86
discernible.398 Brush strokes, suggestive of human action, give way to instruments and techniques which
ensure the even application of paint. Rauschenberg used a roller and housepaint399 for his
“prototypical…series of six works composed of from one to seven panels of rolled white enamel
paint,”400 while Robert Mangold famously used a spray gun to maximize the evenness of application
(Figure 49).401 Even though these works remain dependent on the effort of artists, “the „look‟ of
fabrication was evident in most paintings.”402 Neutrality, impersonality and anonymity quickly became
one of the understated yet striking hallmarks of minimalist painting.
Figure 49: Robert Mangold, Red Wall, 1965.
Minimalist composers were similarly concerned with investigating the manner in which technology might
intensify their aesthetic aims. Steve Reich‟s Pendulum Music, for example, is a process work which
398
It is important to emphasize that minimalism retains a remarkable technical heterogeneity within and between its
various media (Strickland, Minimalism, 7; Baker, Minimalism, 9, 13, 20).
399
Frank Stella would later use black housepaint on unprimed canvas, generating a depth of blackness that remains a
touchstone of minimalist painting (Strickland, Minimalism, 26).
400
Ibid.
401
Ibid., 52, 75, 113-4; Colpitt, Minimal Art, 23; Marzona, Minimal Art, 70; Benedikt refers to Mangold‟s
“disarming...pastel, matt-surfaced wall-slabs” (Michael Benedikt, “Sculpture as Architecture: New York Letter,
1966-67,” MA, 74.
402
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 23.
87
derives its content from “allowing four microphones to swing above four upturned speakers” (Track 9).403
Like many of the conceptual compositions of John Cage, La Monte Young, and various of the latter‟s
Fluxus contemporaries, the musical process is notated entirely in regular language:
2, 3, 4 or more microphones are suspended from the ceiling by their cables, that they all hang the same
distance from floor and are all free to swing with a pendular motion. Each microphone‟s cable is plugged
into an amplifier which is connected to a speaker. Each microphone hangs a few inches directly above or
next to it‟s [sic] speaker…The performance begins with the performers taking each mike, pulling it back
like a swing, and then in unison releasing all of them together. Performers then carefully turn up each
amplifier just to the point where feedback occurs when a mike swings directly over or next to it‟s [sic]
speaker. Thus, a series of feedback pulses are heard which will either be all in unison or not depending on
the gradually changing phase relations of the different mike pendulums. Performers then sit down to watch
and listen to the process along with the audience…The piece is ended sometime after all mikes have come
404
to rest and are feeding back a continuous tone.
Unique in Reich‟s compositional output for its conceptual focus, the composition incorporates in a
technologically progressive manner, a distinctly Dadaist transgression of artistic convention and medium
with an aleatory processual element which clearly recalls the endeavours of John Cage. 405
Simultaneously, the work has an austerity which is characteristically minimalist. It incorporates drone and
repeated sound in a singular manner: the latter gives way to the former; the telos of the composition
proves distinctly ateleological – the work loses momentum, moves away from a sense of its own finitude
even as it progresses, and gives way to a continuum rather than a consummation of poietic effort. Here,
repetition simultaneously dissolves, transforms, and reforms the work. As the energy of the swinging
microphones dissipates, pulsing sound is transformed into stable drone. The potential relationship of
minimalism to the logic of transumption is once again reinforced. As the swaying microphone comes to
rest, we witness a process through which force, work and movement reconstitute themselves, through
their dissipation, as sound. Technology, originally designed to mediate (amplify) sound for aesthetic
effect, becomes the source of sound qua aesthetic work.
403
Schwartz, Minimalists, 68. See Steve Reich, Pendulum Music, 1973/ Steve Reich, “Pendulum Music,” Writings
on Music: 1965-2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 31-2.
404
Steve Reich, Pendulum Music (London: Universal Edition, 1980).
405
In a celebrated interview, Reich draws out these connections to Cage‟s work: “where [Cage] was willing to keep
his musical sensibility out of his own music, I was not.” (Steve Reich, “Excerpts from an Interview in Art Forum,”
Writings on Music, 33). Reich, instead, sought “music…that was completely personal…but that was arrived at by
impersonal means” (ibid.).
88
The displacement of poiesis from individual genius to the impersonal processes of Pendulum Music
accentuates minimalism‟s concern with the conjunction of the singularity of personal facture and the
generic, impersonal techniques and technologies and processes of fabrication. It also clarifies how the
minimalist proclivity for impersonal, physical or perceptual process406 facilitates the objectal appeals of
minimalism both to aesthetic distension and transumption. “[O]f all my pieces [Pendulum Music] was the
most impersonal, and was the most emblematic and the most didactic in terms of the process idea [that
process is impersonal and independent of its objects407] and also most sculptural,”408 claims Reich. “In
many ways, you could describe Pendulum Music as audible sculpture, with the objects being the swinging
microphones and the loudspeakers. I always set them up quite clearly as sculpture.”409
Here is exhibited the manner in which, by attempting to expose the radix of its medium, the minimalist
work habitually transgresses generic limits, is transmediated, or even produces the radix of something
entirely new. Minimalism expresses a singular responsibility with regard to poiesis and the new,
rendering maximally visible the processes by which novelty asserts itself – not merely differentially, but
positively, by the instantiation of a rarity entirely unanticipated. It offers minimal impediment both to an
accurate sensory and conceptual retracing of the art-object itself, since the generation or exposition of
such an objecthood is, perhaps, minimalism‟s most universal aim. Minimalism allows us to delineate,
with a singular closeness, the processes through which such novel objects emerge within and sustain their
status as art. Because its objects habitually eschew reference to meaning or contexts outside of
themselves, minimalism also affords a great clarification of the minimal displacement required for an
object – apparently neutral, objective, and indifferent – to become incorporated into the subjective
processes of individual or group agents. Such displacement might best be understood by considering the
manner in which explanatory analysis easily becomes causal in itself; how various ideological valences
regarding the importance and place of objects in the contemporary world come to be exercised, and how
the significance of context comes to be principally of causal rather than explanatory significance. Objects,
exposed through minimalism in their blunt, objectal facticity, might easily become agents to validate and
often ossify certain cultural sequences which require objects as their principal capital. In short, it is in
minimalism that we discover the tools which allow us to understand how objects speak: speak themselves
in their absolute independence; speak in relation to other objects and subjects, conceptual and existential
406
Foster, Return, 36-42; Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 157; MAP, 178-83.
“I compose the material, decide the process it‟s going to be run through – but once these initial choices have been
made, it runs by itself.” (ibid).
408
Steve Reich, “Second Interview with Michael Nyman,” Writings on Music, 95 (91-6).
409
Ibid.
407
89
sequences; speak as examples of specific cultural situations; speak as examples of the force of generation
itself, or poiesis. Sometimes such speech might be clearly located in the objectal status of the object qua
object, while at other times it emerges in the temporal and interactive complexity of processes of
production, reception, and interpretation. I contend that both ultimately depend on the recognition that
what persists in the object – what conditions the persistence of minimalism in whatever manifestation – is
something akin to a poietic space. However, the difficulty of demarcating this evasive space increasingly
leads us to the position that we urgently require not an aesthetic space, as such, but an aesthetic non-space
or atopos – a poietic atopia. This atopia is nothing other than the proper place of exemplarity, which
Agamben perspicuously defines in terms of a para-ontology.
It is such an atopian poetics – not unique to minimalism, but uniquely decipherable through minimalism,
on account of the latter‟s proclivity for an objecthood unhampered by self-conscious complexity – that
accounts for the persistence of minimalism. The persistence of minimalism, in turn, is what renders it a
potent vehicle in understanding the difficult but vital field of exemplarity, of how things come to be
known through something intrinsic to their constitution, and how this radiation of intrinsic knowability
comes to be effective in the world. I argue that this knowability of objects must ultimately be tied to their
Being, rather than any epistemological rendering of their being. More subtly still, minimalism clarifies
what might be termed quite precisely the minimal distance between an object in-itself and its selfreflexive capacity, which is required for it to be knowable as such without external reference. In this light,
what minimalism affords is a particularly potent mechanism for understanding the way in which objects
render themselves exemplary in the first place, how such exemplarity has an agency of its own prior to
any so-called subjective intervention, and how such objects promise a better understanding of the way in
which objects and subjects become intricated in the first place, a consideration with implications as farreaching for the contemporary understanding of law, ethics, politics and economics, as for art, aesthetics
or cultural production.
90
5. A MINIMALIST TOPOLOGY OF THE REAL
a) The pursuit of the Real as a transection of Being and existence
Numerous conceptions of realism fail to grasp with cogency the distinction between Being and existence,
and thus between ontology and existentialism.410 The present work differs sharply in this respect.
Following Badiou‟s understanding, at its heart is the assertion that being qua being – generally rendered
as Being411 – must be regarded in terms of pure multiplicity. Such pure multiplicity412 can be
mathematically demonstrated by the proofs of axiomatic set theory.413 While existence occurs within such
Being, it in no senses reduces,414 nor can it be understood properly as identical with, this Being. Pure
Being is necessarily indifferent to existence, but existence is not indifferent to pure Being. Existence is
subtracted from, and hence in a significant sense dependent upon, Being.415 In light of the insistence that
Being and existence ought at all times to be distinguished most carefully from one another, the following
is offered: the Real is that which traverses both Being and existence, as the potentiality of an entity which
persists within the subtraction of an existential field from pure multiplicity; which has consistency in
existing simultaneously in terms of multiplicity and unity – multiplicity which is counted-as-one by “a
system of conditions through which the multiple can be recognized as multiple”416
410
Iikka Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 1.
As with the terms the Real and the Count, the upper-case of Being should not be mistaken for a transcendental
claim on behalf of either term, but as a means of differentiating the present from general uses of these terms.
412
The “axiomatization” (BE, 43) through which a “pure doctrine of the multiple is presented” (ibid.) occurs
“[b]etween 1908 and 1940...[begun] by Zermelo and completed by Fraenkel, von Neumann and Gödel” (ibid.).
413
Ibid., 43-8.
414
BE, 90-1, 128-9, 142-6; SMP, 76-9. See Sam Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist
Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 48-9; Jason Barker, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto,
2002), 66-9; Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2003), 163.
This position may be usefully compared to Hilary Lawson‟s proposition that every reality is defined by closure –
“[t]he process...[of] holding that which is different as the same through the realization of material” (Hilary Lawson,
Closure: A Story of Everything (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 9) – but that closure “is unlimited in the
sense that there are no bounds to the number of possible closures that can be realized” (ibid., 17). See also ibid., 103; 16-20.
415
Christopher Norris, Badiou’s Being and Event (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 226-7.
416
BE, 29. Elsewhere Badiou refers to this process in terms of a metastructure, the Count and the State. Because of
its appropriateness to our present concern with quantitative ontology and its instantiation in minimalism, I have
usually preferred the term Count.
411
91
b) Species of realism
Derived from the Latin res – thing, in both its abstract and concrete dimensions – the real leads to an
understanding of reality as “the totality of all real things,”417 and realism as “a philosophical doctrine
about the reality [of real things].”418 All realisms share a radical, if minimal, positivity: for an entity to be
real it must, first, exist, and, second, exist independently.419 Thus, for a realist, “at least part of reality is
ontologically independent of human minds.”420 The rejection of realism must first of all replace this
autonomy with an understanding that reality is limited by some form of access to the real.421 The
misapprehension upon which this activity coheres is its insistence that some sort of symmetry pertains
between the real, the unreal, the non-real and the irreal422 – the various degrees of accepting or subverting
realism, in other words. Hence the circularity of Lawson‟s argument is far from convincing: “realism
even as a hypothetical goal, of whatever form or however limited, is not an option, for the destructive
self-reference that has been identified in non-realism, and which typifies the contemporary predicament,
has its roots in the project of uncovering a true picture of an independent reality.”423
From the perspective of the present argument, Lawson‟s errors are several. The extreme model of selfreference which he develops too gratuitously conflates cause and telos, suggesting that apparent stability
is always subject to epistemological circularity. Thus Lawson justifies inserting into his argument a
conceptual, stabilizing mechanism,424 closure: “the means by which our experience is constructed;”425 the
417
Niiniluoto, Critical, 1.
Ibid.
419
Robert Noal and Gürol Irzik, Philosophy, Science, Education and Culture (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 286.
420
Niiniluoto, Critical, 10.
421
Brassier, Ray, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” Collapse
III (2007): 375-6, 412. The former page reference is a contribution of Graham Harman (hereafter SRH), the latter of
Quentin Meillassoux (hereafter SRM). Also see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency (London and New York, Continuum, 2008), 5, 19-20. Hereafter AF.
422
Philosophical irrealism is most closely associated with Nelson Goodman, who claims that “[n]either by logic nor
by any other means can we prove something from nothing. We have to start with some premises and principles; and
there are no absolute and incontrovertible certainties available” (Nelson Goodman, “On Starmaking,” Starmaking:
Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism, ed. Peter J. McCormick (Cambridge, Mass. And London: MIT, 1996), 144).
423
Lawson, Closure, xxvii. Lawson leans rather too heavily on semantic realism, and consequently maintains an
argument which is sometimes simplistic rather than elegantly simple: “a complete and true account of the universe is
not possible because if it is complete it will be self-referential, and if it is self-referential it cannot also be true”
(ibid., xxix).
424
Ibid., xxxvii. Ironically, this supposedly anti-realist mechanism is not unlike those theoretical entities abstract or
conceptual entities (Niiniluoto, Critical, 8, 12) by which various types of scientific realism habitually forward their
arguments (ibid., 12).
425
Lawson, Closure, 2.
418
92
imposition of “fixity on openness,”426 “hold[ing] that which is different as the same...realiz[ing] material
which is in addition to that which preceded it.”427 By a convenient conjunction of self-reference and
necessity, Lawson contends that closures produce the effect of contingent reality in the absence of real
reality: “[i]t is through the provision of a reality which is relatively stable that we are able to maintain our
system of closures even though that system is constantly changing.”428 In this manner, and by failing
sufficiently to distinguish semantic, epistemological and ontological realism, 429 Lawson‟s anti-realism is
blunted; dispersed into a quasi-pragmatic field. The implicit maxim here – whatever does the job of the
real, is sure not to be real430 – seems to be more dogmatically than it is logically derived, resting on
rhetorical refutation of realism, but addressing only obliquely even its most minimal claim regarding the
existence of ontologically autonomous and mind-independent entities (entity realism).431 Lawson is
perhaps correct in many of the details of his argument. Indeed, his identification of an ontological plenum
– fundamentally multiple and unpredictable, unmarked rather than marked – from which must be
subtracted contingent stability, is close to what Badiou argues in terms of subtraction, and which is central
to the present work.
In brief, Lawson‟s anti-realism moves in a complex but essentially epistemological orbit which fails, from
the perspective of the present argument, either to account for or to counter the radical ontological claim
which realism makes when it asserts that at least some part of Being is autonomous, independent and
coherent. A similar case can be made against any anti-realism432 which fails to address convincingly
either this minimal criterion of the Real, or the particularities of the species of realism against which it
426
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 10. “It is because the material is „in addition‟ to that which preceded it, and not merely a manipulation of
the which preceded it, that closure does not eradicate or exhaust openness, but instead provides a means of holding
openness as something” (ibid.).
428
Ibid., 99. See ibid., 93, 98-9.
429
See Jerold L. Aronson, Rom Harré and Eileen Cornell Way, Realism Rescued: How Scientific Progress is
Possible (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995), 1-2; Niiniluoto, Critical, 2-4.
430
Here we might recall Goodman‟s view that it is “[s]urely not...any sort of resemblance to reality” (Nelson
Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merill, 1968), 34) that
“constitutes a realism of representation” (ibid.), but an adherence to a similar means of presentation (ibid., 39).
431
See Niiniluoto, Critical , 2-3, 12; John Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford and
New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 254-6.
432
Christopher Norris is justifiably critical of several species of anti-realism: “trivial semantic variety” (that an
intrinsic instability in signification is sufficient decisively to undermine reality); “ „strong‟ sociological or culturalrelativist approaches” (which have a “large investment in the idea of scientific „truth‟ or „reality‟ as relative
to…some culture-specific discourse” (Christopher Norris, New idols of the cave: On the limits of anti-realism
(Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1997), 117)), and formal arguments which assert that the loss of
“recognition-transcendent truths” amounts to the loss of the Real (Christopher Norris, “Reply to Jeff Malpas: On
Truth, Realism, Changing one's Mind about Davidson (not Heidegger), and Related Topics,” International Journal
of Philosophical Studies Vol. 12.3 (2004): 358-9. Also see Norris, New idols, 117-20.
427
93
sets itself.433 Thus, metaphysical realism – variously the crux of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy
which echoes into medieval scholasticism – must be countered not only by a destruction of metaphysics,
to paraphrase Heidegger,434 but by a process by which the Real is decisively uncoupled from metaphysics.
Likewise, once it has been recognized that various routes travelled by the Enlightenment tradition rest on
the imbrication of the Real – either as radix or telos – with such methodological concerns as deduction or
induction, rationalism or empiricism, it is impossible to ignore, or negate by a weak anti-realism
(relativism or pragmatism), the minimal yet immanent positivity to which they attest. The Kantian
position – which is contested and adapted by various types of phenomenology, perhaps most notably that
of Husserl – does not dismiss the Real so much as suspend it between mind and perception. Indeed, a
dialectic of presence and absence to a significant extent informs the Hegelian, Marxist, Freudian,
Lacanian and Derridean understanding of reality and the Real.
It is true that the venerable metaphysical lineage of realism is in fact not as easily separable from its
scientific manifestation as one might suppose. Russell argues that the early classical forms of philosophy
and science were practically indistinguishable,435 and we do not overstate the case to recognize amongst
the earliest realists the Presocratic atomists. It is therefore not surprising that anti-realism is a “prevailing
trend”436 which in a significant sense is as alien to common sense437 as it is to positivist science. The
broadest distinction with regard to the Real is between a metaphysical and a non-metaphysical realism.
Modern (post-Enlightenment) philosophy has tended to view the latter as more susceptible to analysis
than the former, although the present argument regards the Real as a radical term with a trajectory of its
own.438 Hilary Putnam follows the distinction of scientific from pre-scientific, or common sense,
realism.439 The decisive shift from an intuitively derived metaphysics to scientific realism occurs in the
Galilean claim that the world operates by a mathematical physics and can be translated by mathematical
433
Norris reports on several of the extremes at which realist and anti-realist arguments unwittingly support one
another (Norris, “Reply to Jeff Malpas,” 362, 370).
434
See pages 207-9 of the present work. In Norris‟ estimation an “authentic truth” from which the coordinates of
reality might be taken, is, for Heidegger, “vouchsafed in certain fragments of the Presocratics but thereafter
progressively obscured by the accretions of „Western metaphysics‟ and latter-day technoscience” (Norris, New idols,
119). See Norris, “Reply to Jeff Malpas,” 369.
435
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 15.
436
Norris, New Idols, 117.
437
Niiniluoto, Critical, 8.
438
There has been a notable, if sometimes hyperbolic, resurgence in realist thought in these early years of the
twenty-first century, most notably under the banner of speculative realism, closely associated with the journal
Collapse, and a recent collection of essays, The Speculative Turn (Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham
Harman, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011)).
439
Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures (La Salle: Open Court, 1987), 3-4.
94
formulae.440 For Putnam,441 “[t]he kind of scientific realism we have inherited from the seventeenth
century has not lost all its prestige even yet, but it has saddled us with a disastrous picture of the world” 442
“that denies precisely the common man‟s kind of realism, his realism about tables and chairs.” 443 The
world as it is, is thus reduced to a world as it is given – one in which truth is sovereign marker, but only
insofar as it marks a transcendental alethic444 point, or, alternately, a strong correspondence or
convergence445 between cause and effect.446 While transcendental models of truth originate from
metaphysics, convergent models – which (following Tarski) can be either deflationary or minimal,447 or
inflationary,448 in which case they seek “some extra correspondence, or coherentist, or pragmatist
condition”449 – ground themselves in immanent correspondences. Such correspondences may themselves
be conceptualized in numerous ways: most significantly, for the present purpose, in terms of
verisimilitude – that one proposition can be more true than others, without approaching absolute truth450 –
and veridicality – that propositions can be absolutely true given the hypothetical completeness of a
situation, but, that since the completeness of a situation is itself only contingent, truth, in fact, is always in
the process of being completed.451 The central proposition here, however, is simply that the majority of
realist models are “charted in terms of their attitudes towards truth.”452
Niiniluoto usefully distinguishes six realist species: ontological realism, which addresses the possibility
of a mind-independent world; semantical realism, which attempts to establish reality in terms of an
objective correlation between language or thought and world; epistemological realism, which formulates
such correlation in terms of knowledge; axiological realism, which stipulates that at the heart of real
being or knowledge is an axiom binding these to truth or non-truth; methodological realism which
determines the most reliable means of arriving at knowledge regarding reality; and ethical realism which
440
Ibid., 5.
Norris notes of this view a “retreat...from a robust realism to an „internalist‟ perspective on issues of knowledge
and truth” (Norris, Idols, 1-2).
442
Putnam, Faces, 8.
443
Ibid., 7.
444
See Norris, “Reply to Jeff Malpas,” 362.
445
Aronson, Harré and Way, Realism Rescued, 123.
446
Ibid., 359.
447
Nola and Irzik, Philosophy, Science, 65.
448
Ibid.
449
Ibid.
450
Ibid.; See W.H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), 54-6;
Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism: How science tracks truth (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 252-3.
451
Alain Badiou, “Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable,” TW, 130-1.
452
Niiniluoto, Critical, 10. See ibid., 3-4; Losee, Historical Introduction, 253-6; B.K. Ridley, On Science (London
and New York: Routledge, 2001), 43.
441
95
sets as its task the exposition of moral values.453 Accepting that arguments regarding realism almost
invariably return to evidentiary cases for the existence of reality, science or quasi-science retain a
considerable significance, in which light Niiniluoto‟s typology454 is particularly stimulating. Beginning
with the question of truth, a triple distinction is made – between anarchists, who altogether reject truth as
a basis of reality; those who substitute a suitable equivalent concept to that of truth; and those who favour
some sort of model in which reality, fact and truth correspond. Amongst truth equivalents we might
consider the offerings of pragmatists and neopragmatists, from Dewey and James to Rorty;455 “semantic
anti-realists”456 such as Dummett, who seek systematically to decouple reality from truth; internal realists
such as Putnam, who resists the slide into relativism by promoting a limited degree of internal
consistency;457 and sociological relativists and constructivists such as Stengers or Latour.458 For
Niniiluoto, however, the most scientifically and philosophically convincing realist models accept truth as
a point of convergence for the Real, in which case it is possible to proceed either descriptively or
theoretically.
The inductive tradition in the sciences endorses a broadly descriptive model of truth while embracing a
type of methodological realism. Amongst these are empiricists such as Bacon, Berkeley, Locke and
Hume, positivists from Comte to the more radical logical positivism of the Vienna circle (Neurath,
Schlick and Carnap) and logical atomist precursors, Russell and Wittgenstein, and, more latterly,
instrumentalists such as Nagel, Stegmüller459 and van Fraasen.460 However, since descriptive language can
only approximate reality, every programme of transcendental realism which attempts to “give an adequate
account of...the sciences, in all their differences and specificities as well as their unity” 461 is at best
contingent – “merely that of the best account currently available.”462 The result is progressive doubt as to
the completeness of any theoretical account of reality, in which sphere we encounter numerous “half-
453
Niiniluoto, Critical, 2. Niniiluoto‟s exposition is limited to formal models of realism. Questions of creative
realism are incorporated below.
454
Ibid., 11.
455
Ibid., 12.
456
Ibid.
457
Ibid.; Roy Bhasksar, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (London and New
York: Verso, 1989), 155.
458
Niiniluoto, Critical, 12.
459
This thought also has a strongly constructivist leaning.
460
Losee, Historical Introduction, 257-8.
461
Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 183.
462
Ibid., 143.
96
realism[s],”463 most notably the entity realism of Cartwright, Hacking, Harré and Giere which recognizes
that “theoretical entities...play a role in causal explanation, but denies realism about theoretical laws.”464
Half-realism emphasizes the dispute as to whether the realist vocation lies in the faithful transcription
through theory of existing relationships between entities, or whether it resides in the production of new
entities themselves.465 In this sense, as well as by the manner in which either proposition finally is
compelled to deal with its axiological basis – its acceptance of reality as a predicate of truth at the
expense of an apophatic realism – we are enjoined to recognize that “truth, realism and verisimilitude are
all part of a single [and, ultimately, metaphysical] picture.”466 Thus it is that such an axiology draws
realism back to its most fundamental ground – that upon which the conflict between realism and antirealism plays out, as well as upon which is posited the distinction of pre-scientific or so-called naive
realism467 from scientific realism. Sceptics such as Feyerabend and irrealists such as Goodman maintain
their positions on methodological rather than rhetorical grounds,468 as opposed to common sense realism
which, though probably correct, does not habitually represent itself in the most convincing light.
Mediating extreme scepticism and naivety is critical realism. If critical realism is perhaps a term too
general to be applied with consistency, it nonetheless includes various robust contestations of absolute
reality or lack of reality (some axiomatic and entity realists amongst them) and extends even to the
political programme of Bhaskar‟s meta-theory: “[c]ritical realism embraces a coherent account of the
nature of nature, society, science, human agency and philosophy (including itself). Its intent is to
underlabour for science, conceived as a necessary but insufficient agency of human emancipation.”469
The aims of the present work are far humbler, tentatively returning to the most minimal claim of
ontological realism from the perspective of aesthetic objects – that there are autonomous entities which
persist within the existential field called reality. The claim is that minimalism attempts to clarify – in
minimal, objectal terms – the very generative acts and transformative processes broadly describable in
463
Niiniluoto, Critical, 12.
Ibid.
465
Paul K. Feyerabend, Realism, rationalism and scientific method: Philosophical papers Volume 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1981), 6.
466
Aronson, Harré and Way, Realism Rescued, 123.
467
What is naive about naive realism is not the contention that reality is defined by the existence of autonomous
entities, but that that “certified truth [regarding such entities] is easily accessible” (Niiniluoto, Critical, 13).
However, the assumption that everyday realism simply “takes the world to be precisely as it appears to us”
(Niiniluoto, Critical, 8), which view is then supplemented by science or metaphysics, is inaccurate to the extent that
no perception is entirely neutral and unaffected by practical and theoretical assumptions (ibid.) Consequently there
can be no universal reality that is not also entirely indifferent to whether or not it is real as such.
468
Ibid., 13. Norris, New idols, 2, 207-8.
469
Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 191.
464
97
terms of poiesis. In this it does not produce reality so much as gain access to that which is real as
transparently as possible. Thus it is possible to return with greater confidence to our principal thesis:
minimalism exemplifies the facticity and persistence of the Real.
The objects of minimalism, and the field within which these objects emerge, appeal to a quite different
type of realism. Perhaps we conceptualise minimalist objects best in terms of an agnostic,470 common
sense realism – objects which testify to their own indifferent facticity, to that which simply is as it is –
which nonetheless submit to the strong descriptivism of empirical confirmation. Minimalism, as a
contingent field of aesthetic practices, exhibits itself through a strongly self-reflexive form of entity
realism: the existential intensity of minimalism is greatest on neither a conceptual nor an objectal ground,
but with regard to its taking-place as the connection between the object and the Real as an abstract,
minimal entity. Regarding the factical ground or implications of this position, we echo Meillassoux‟s
assertion that “facticity is the lack of reason for any reality”471 – or, in other words, that facticity indicates
the coherence of a reality as it is despite the fact that it could have been otherwise. Thus minimalism does
not constitute reality as such – it remains indifferent in this regard precisely to exhibit the generic manner
of belonging to the Real – but most certainly posits the question with unprecedented emphasis as to
whether or not aesthetic objects have the capacity to clarify the relation between fact and reality.
c) Clarifying the Real
The realism to which minimalism attests is homologous but adjacent to those models offered in terms of
scientific realism. Traditionally, aesthetics has concerned itself principally with mimetic realism.472 To the
extent that it claims a correspondential relation between a descriptive language and the world, mimesis is
certainly a species of realism. The precise extent to which its reach is limited ontologically,
epistemologically, semantically, or axiologically remains an area of contention, however.473 Historically,
470
See Psillos, Scientific Realism, 179-84.
SRM, 428.
472
Considering the reduction of realist aesthetic to a reproduction of reality, it is important to keep in mind
Raymond Tallis‟ hesitation regarding the “tendency to assimilate the iconic truth of a representational mode of
signification to the referential truth of an expressive mode of signification” (Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism
(London: Edward Arnold, 1988), 195. Danto similarly identifies possible disputes as to whether representation is
properly intensional, extensional or relational (Danto, Transfiguration, 68-70). Also see Goodman, Languages, 34-9.
473
Although in terms often quite different to those of the present discussion, René Girard‟s Deceit, Desire and the
Novel (René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Frecerro
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965)) and Violence and the Sacred (René Girard, Violence and the
Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975)), as well as Philippe Lacoue471
98
the question of aesthetic verisimilitude is organized by a mimetic rather than an artistic economy – the set
of techniques by which existent entities are imitated,474 rather than those theoretical correspondences
between world and work, including the question of beauty, which arguably has been the dominant one for
aestheticians since the eighteenth century.475 Periodic revivals of realism are less revolutionary than they
are radical – at once gestures of conservation and renovation, aesthetic immanence and metaphysical
transcendence – and succeed to the extent that they expose the minimal but requisite distance between the
world and the mimemata.476
Here Danto‟s views are instructive regarding the intensification of the relation between thought and
reality which art effects: first, that “philosophy begins to arise only when the society within which it
arises achieves a concept of reality...that can happen only when a contrast is available between reality and
something else – appearances, illusion, representation, art;”477and second, its corollaries, that “one could
not imagine, any more than one could a world made up just of shadows, a world made up solely of
artworks. One could imagine a world without artworks...for such a world would be exactly that in which
the concept of reality had not yet arisen.”478
The difficult relation between thought and reality is precisely that which is intuited by the techniques of
mimesis which define realist art. Historically, the representational goals of aesthetic realism correspond
considerably to the directives of non-scientific realism.479 If, in both spheres, realism fails to coincide
with reality, this occurs not because the latter is resistant to translation, but because our mechanisms for
perceiving and reproducing reality are limited and, as has been suggested, necessarily so if the coherence
of particular entities is to be maintained. Realism is in this sense the foil to an idealist transcendentalism,
motivated, as Nochlin notes, by the desire of art to express its own contemporaneity. 480 The thrust of
Labarthe‟s Typography (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. and ed.
Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998)) remain seminal analyses of the cultural and ontological
significance of mimesis and its relationship to truth and reality.
474
Danto offers several significant arguments regarding the manner in which imitation, inasmuch as it is intensional,
does not necessarily require an original (Danto, Transfiguration, 68-71).
475
Göran Sörbom, “The Classical Concept of Mimesis,” A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn
Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 19-21.
476
Ibid., 22; Danto, Transfiguration, 13, 79, 82; Tallis, Defence, 195.
477
Ibid., 78.
478
Ibid., 83.
479
Paisley Livingston, “Why Realism Matters: Literary Knowledge and the Philosophy of Science,” Realism and
Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George
Levine (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993), 143-5, 150; Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary
Modernism,” Realism and Representation, 193-4.
480
Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1971), 103, 105-6.
99
Lukács‟ celebrated position is not dissimilar. Although the efforts of modernism may be directed towards
expressions of formalist autonomy,481 desocialized existentialism,482 and denaturalized thought,483 the
principal exigency of contemporary art remains its capacity for exemplifying a “concrete potentiality
[which] is concerned with the dialectic between the individual‟s subjectivity and objective reality.” 484
From such concrete potentiality is actualized the force of a contemporary realism – one which
“deliberately introduces elements of disintegration...to portray the contemporary world more exactly,” 485
but which nonetheless returns art to social and political actuality and its participation in history.486
It would simply be inaccurate – regardless of how convincing one finds Lukács‟ case for realism at the
expense of modernism – to deny that several strands of the modernist aesthetic approach realism through
their acute awareness that the abandonment of mimesis offers a plausible culmination not only for the
trend towards autonomy, but also the search for abstract purity.487 Critical misprision in this regard is
fuelled by a view of reality which is not elegant for its simplicity, but rather simply dogmatic. For such a
realist, who maintains “that truth to observed facts – facts about the outer world, or facts about his own
feelings – is important,”488and who is “intent on arresting semantic play by insisting on the need of lifelikeness and verisimilitude in representation,”489 the sensus communis retains a naivety which resists
theoretical substantiation. To this dogmatic view minimalism offers a genuinely radical counterpoint,
circumventing the associated problems by substituting the object itself for the entire mimetic system.
Yet, as has already been noted, the radical reorientation towards the world of objects is in a significant
sense a fulfilment of the realist vocation to intensify rather than replicate reality, and is a solution not
entirely without precedent. Modernist avant-gardes frequently emphasize that objects potentially function
metonymically with respect to reality, from the Dadaist readymade, 490 to a growing significance of
481
Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963),
19, 25.
482
Ibid., 19-24.
483
Ibid., 27, 31-3, 38-9.
484
Lukács, Meaning, 24.
485
Ibid., 39
486
Ibid., 34, 36. This is similar to arguments offered by most broadly Marxist analyses of the opposition of
modernism and reality, including by Adorno, Benjamin and some of the later Frankfurt School (See Pam Morris,
Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 17-23). Bruce Robbins makes a convincing case for
reconsidering the relation between representation and realism as determined by social rather than epistemological
criteria (Bruce Robbins, “Modernism and Literary Realism: Response,” Realism and Representation, 225-231).
487
Foster, Return, 127.
488
G.S. Fraser, The Modern Writer and His World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 21.
489
Fluck, Surface and Depth, 69.
490
The relation of the Dadaist aesthetic to minimalism is discussed in some detail below.
100
indifferent things in the experimental novel. Stein and Joyce are both deeply concerned with “the
objectivity and apartness of things,”491 and the Bloomsbury group, particularly Woolf, adopted aspects of
G.E. Moore‟s brand of atomism by way of a psychologico-phenomenal realism which regards as central
the constructive importance of sensation in its relation to externality.492
In a proposition reminiscent of Stein,493 Alain Robbe-Grillet considers literature subject to a mimetic
exhaustion in which the writer “has nothing to say, [retaining] merely a manner of speaking.”494 The
vocation of words becomes once again poietic – not the reflection, but rather the generation, of reality
itself, “creat[ing] a world...out of dust.”495 Attending to infinitesimal detail, Robbe-Grillet‟s prose
constitutes a literary phenomenology of particular severity, it is true, but also of poietic promise. The
reality of objects is carefully distributed between sensation and perception and the literary means of
negotiating and relating these, but, moreover, is intensified by the peculiarly self-reflexive, and arguably
self-productive, character of this radical realism. It is difficult to accept the hyperbolic claims that the
problems of formal realism “completely lose[…] their meaning the moment we realise that not only does
everyone see his own version of reality in the world, but that it is precisely the novel that creates this
reality.”496 Here the suggestion is not simply that a realism which knows itself as such escapes the
“[o]bjectivity [which], in the current meaning of the term – a completely impersonal way of looking at
things – is only too obviously a chimera.”497 Rather, by integrating aesthetic self-reflexivity with a precise
mimesis – keeping in mind here Danto‟s argument that representation does not of necessity require a
formal prototype498 – Robbe-Grillet believes that artificiality and reality become indistinguishable through
a work‟s objectal presence. The reality of the work is “no longer...permanently situated elsewhere, but
here and now, without ambiguity...[and] no longer find[s] its justification in a hidden meaning…Beyond
what we see…there would henceforth be nothing.”499
491
Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 25.
S.P. Rosenbaum, Aspects of Bloomsbury: Studies in Modern English Literary and Intellectual History (London:
MacMillan, 1998), 4. This prefigures Merleau-Ponty‟s identification of sensation as the basic unit of perception
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 3-12.
Hereafter PP).
493
Indeed, similar propositions are offered by Beckett as well as Sontag.
494
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “On Some Outdated Notions,” Snapshots and Towards A New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright
(London: Calder and Boyars, 1965), 73.
495
Ibid.
496
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “From Realism to Reality,” Snapshots, 156.
497
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “A Path for the Future Novel,” Snapshots, 52.
498
Danto, Transfiguration, 69-70
499
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “On Some Outdated Notions,” 68-9.
492
101
This is fairly conventional of the canonical minimalist aesthetic which Robbe-Grillet was to influence
significantly.500 Turning to the short prose work, In the Corridors of the Underground, we discover
exemplified with some clarity the strategies which distinguish Robbe-Grillet‟s phenomenological
literature from its realist predecessors. The first part of the work, “The Escalator,” presents a meticulous
description of a group of people on an escalator in a Parisian underground station. To grasp accurately
what simply is, Robbe-Grillet intimates that the initial definitions and anticipated objects of existing
knowledge must be suspended. Here is not the commonplace escalator, but its moving parts – “a long,
iron-grey staircase, whose steps become level, one after the other, as they get to the top, and disappear,
one by one…with a heavy, and yet at the same time abrupt, regularity.”501 By a curious inverse
nominalism, the escalator is kept at an ontological distance from its passengers: its name is withheld, and
its haecceity or thisness502 is divorced from its functionality.
Such phenomenality is heightened by a careful exposition of the “inexpressive”503 character which
pervades perception, even in its constructiveness. It is the dystopian vision of “a universe in which
...most things are unsayable”504 which excites from the minimalist text a perceptible realness. Impassive
realness is reinforced by the redundancy or circularity of motion. Movement is “almost imperceptible”505
or gives way to “motionless[ness]”506 itself, of a group “petrified for the duration of the mechanical
journey.”507 Furthermore, what minimal movement exists is repeated,508 uniform in speed,509 and
preserves an indifferent equidistance between objects,510 negating a dynamic sense of temporal passage.
We might associate such instances of inertia with a deconditioning which Cela claims is implicit in the
position language adopts in relation to itself in Robbe-Grillet‟s writing.511 Admitting such self-reflexive
deconditioning, it is possible to clarify the manner in which Robbe-Grillet‟s phenomenology expands
upon the basic generative units – initial ideas, signs, objects, or situations – from which it is constructed.
500
Strickland, Minimalism, 291.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “In the Corridors of the Underground,” Snapshots, 27-34.
502
This term is discussed below.
503
Ibid., 34. See ibid., 28, 33.
504
Hallett, Minimalism, 25.
505
Robbe-Grillet, “Corridors,” 27.
506
Ibid., 27. See ibid., 33-4.
507
Ibid., 27.
508
Ibid., 28-30.
509
Ibid., 29-31.
510
Ibid., 34.
511
Carmen Garcia Cela, “Hearing in Robbe-Grillet,” trans. Denise Pessah, Poetics Today 21.2 (2000): 453.
501
102
Of this creative procedure, Leach notes “a strong inclination to allow the work to develop from a source
outside of [it].”512 Refining this proposition, Morissette identifies three principal types of literary
generator: situational generators – occurrences, or sequence of occurrences, which produce a specific
narrative course;513 formal or linguistic generators – those parts of a text which operate at the level of plot
and structure;514 and serial generation, a “deliberate serial patterning”515 which involves the purposeful
juxtaposition of generators which are not specifically related to narrative content. The work presently
under discussion exemplifies the latter – motion, as it relates to physical and represented movement on the
one hand, and poietic process on the other: in the first part the reader encounters “a motionless group” 516
on an “interrupted journey,”517 which, by the second, gains the uniform momentum of a “thinly scattered
crowd of hurrying people, all moving at the same speed,”518 only to be “brought to a halt,”519 and when
these people attempt to board the train, “they remain more or less stationary.”520
The implication of generative phenomenology is particularly significant to minimalism for the way in
which it refocuses traditional aesthetic consideration to the problems and promises of poiesis ex nihilo.
The affinities between this and the minimalist aesthetic are noteworthy. Both reject any straightforward
notion of mimesis and representation in favour of immediacy, presence and nonrelation. The minimalist
enterprise proposes a further radicalization, however: it substitutes actual objects for representations of
objects; and in place of the intuition of natural processes, it offers direct access to aesthetic processes in
their very taking-place. Its province is thus explicitly an intensification of the Real.
d) Returning to the principles of ontological realism
The species of ontological realism are numerous, and incorporate the realist logic of the pre-scientific
commonplace, quasi-scientific metaphysical realism, and even realist phenomenology. A paradigm of the
512
David Leach, “Parallel Methods in Writing and Visual Arts,” Generative Literature and Generative Art: New
Essays, ed. David Leach (Fredericton: York P, 1983), 11.
513
Bruce Morrissette, “Generative Techniques in Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou,” Generative Literature, 27.
Importantly, Morrissette maintain “there is no such thing as a pure situational generator, and…there is no situation
which does not already occupy a number of forms.” (ibid.)
514
Ibid.
515
Ibid., 31.
516
Robbe-Grillet, “Corridors,” 27, 30.
517
Ibid., 27.
518
Ibid., 31.
519
Ibid., 33.
520
Ibid., 34.
103
latter is offered in the metaphysical thought of Roman Ingarden, which is habitually and unjustly
subordinated to his consideration of literature which, for the most part, is merely a field of exemplarity for
his ontological position.521 For Ingarden, “our apprehension of a real object is based on our recognition
that all the properties of which it is a carrier are appropriate to its nature in that they qualify the object as a
concrete unity.”522 Regardless of whether an object is presented in formal or material terms, or with
regard to its existential mode of being,523 there exists no final disjunction between the object and the
manner of its presentation or apprehension. Hence, “the real world is essentially connected with that of
the nature of the real individual object, since it occurs on the basis of their intertwinings as the possible
form binding together their totality.”524
Although still figured in terms of facticity, realism by this view pertains primarily to ontological, and
secondarily to epistemological correspondences.525 In this sense it differs from the prevailing perspectives
of scientific realism which centre upon the epistemological legislation of facts and phenomena. The
present work aims to return to a realism which recognizes the primacy of its ontological dimension, while
demonstrating that a radical, minimalist aesthetic facilitates our apprehension of the manner in which the
Real transects the ontological and existential planes. In brief, the axiological aspect of aesthetic realism –
the questions of correlation and coordination, of presentation and representation – dominate its
appearance, while a quantitative, ontological minimalism constitutes the radix of its possibility.
In this claim we seek to oppose the elision of the ontological proposition of an entity into the realm of its
qualities or the pattern of causal situations to which it belongs. For instance, that which is Real in a stone
is that it is – the coextensiveness of the activity and facticity of its Being. This position is too readily
confused with the claim that its realism arises because it is a stone, or, in other words, that its realistic
status is the predicate of certain qualities which define its substance. Resisting such a reduction of Being
to qualitative substance and causality, is at the heart of Duns Scotus‟ proposition of haecceity, and is
pursued in the present work, albeit with somewhat different emphasis, in terms of quantitative ontology.
521
Amie Thomasson, “Roman Ingarden,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 20 November 2011
<http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/ingarden/>.
522
Eugene H. Falk, The Poetics of Roman Ingarden (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1981), 114-5.
523
Ingarden identifies the Absolute, Real, Ideal, and Purely Intentional as the four principal or highest modes of
being (Thomasson, “Roman Inharden”).
524
Anna-Teresa Tymnieniecka, “Beyond Ingarden‟s Idealism/Realism Controversy with Husserl - The New
Contextual Phase of Phenomenology, Ingardenia: A Spectrum of Specialized Studies Establishing the Field of
Research (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1976), 283.
525
Thomasson, “Roman Ingarden.”
104
Claiming that it is minimalism which best exemplifies such a quantitative ontology, we face the heart of
Being in terms of pure multiplicity, a position which is subsequently defended with reference to the work
of Alain Badiou. Where extreme forms of representational abstraction – either of entities or processes –
tend to view multiplicity as the aggregate of the qualities they have sought to radicalize, 526 minimalism
intensifies access to, rather than instantiates, such multiplicity. The objects of minimalism, by virtue of
their minimal status – their simplicity, transparency, processual clarity – generate the conditions in which
multiplicity, or the ontological substance of the Real, becomes increasingly visible. Here the distinction of
Being from existence is once again instructive. With respect to Being, minimalism partakes fully of
multiplicity. At the level of existence, however, it makes no claim to instantiate multiplicity. Its works
render maximally perceptible the manner in which art subtracts itself from multiplicity, without reducing
the multiple, and thus attest obliquely to the claim of multiplicity to an ontological absolute: that
multiplicity constitutes every possible horizon of Being.
Here a brief excursus regarding the present use of the term Real is necessary. To this point, real has
mostly been used only to describe competing formulations of realism or reality. Where it has been used in
the upper-case Real it suggests a substantive force. Hence, if the Real is to be regarded as a metaphysical
construct, it must be stressed that its metaphysics would remain deeply rooted in the irremissibility of a
material world marked by the taking-place of objects. Meillassoux captures the dynamic of this situation
well, albeit in general terms, by noting that “[a]gainst dogmatism, it is important that we uphold the
refusal of every metaphysical absolute, but against the reasoned violence of various fanaticisms, it is
important the we re-discover in thought a modicum of absoluteness.”527
The considerable significance of the polemic which persists between realists and anti-realists begins to
emerge in this light. Although anti-realism takes a number of forms, none has proven more influential
than the aesthetic diagnosis offered by Jean Baudrillard, which is effective precisely to the extent that it
mistakes the existential intensity of a particular object for the sum of its qualities. “In fact, [the real] is no
longer really the real,”528 Baudrillard contends. “Never again will the real have the chance to produce
itself.”529 This argument is contingent on accepting not only the ruination of the naturalist first of order of
526
In this respect we might look to examples as diverse as the aleatory work of John Cage, the action painting of
Jackson Pollock, some of the more relentless metafiction of John Barth and the polystylistics of Alfred Schnittke‟s
concerti grossi.
527
AF, 49.
528
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994), 2.
529
Ibid.
105
simulacra – the mimetic processes which, in aiming to reproduce the world as it is, commits it to a naive
realism – but also that the burden of compensating for the loss of a sense of immanence, which
presentation formerly had fallen to realism, now rests increasingly upon second and third order simulacra.
The second order simulates, through the construction of fictions, that which the first order fails accurately
to represent, encouraging speculation regarding possible futures. The third order, to which the second
gives way, involves the “simulacra of simulation,”530which effect a stifling distance between the real and
the represented. “Founded on information”531 they install “the model…[as] an anticipation of the real, and
this leaves no room for any sort of fictional anticipation…or imaginary transcendence.”532 Baudrillard
offers a nostalgic threnody for a time when “[r]eality could go beyond fiction: that was the surest sign of
the possibility of an ever-increasing imaginary. But the real cannot surpass the model…And,
paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true utopia – but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of
the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.”533
It is not unreasonable to wonder whether this state of affairs might not also characterize the relationship
proposed between minimalism and the Real. It has been suggested that minimalism witnesses the Real,
yet does not itself constitute reality per se; it exemplifies the Real, but remains incapable of generating the
Real ex nihilo. The apprehension of that which enters existence while participating in, but not
constituting, the Real, are points indispensable to the present argument. Finally, that which is Real
remains radically indifferent and fundamentally independent of any of its possible manifestations. In this
sense, the Real cannot be predicated in any final sense: it cannot be revealed as such, or contained by any
possible configuration. However, this is not simply to admit to the melancholic insistence of Baudrillard –
of the Real as spectre, a “lost object” to which contemporaneity can no longer lay claim except as an
absence. That the Real is not finally predicable does not condemn us to a disappointed lament for an
impossible utopianism or dystopianism. Instead, it calls us to imagine an atopia: a positive non-space;
positive and, indeed, posited by the exemplary entities which bear witness to the Real – such objects as
those which minimalism seeks to present.
Displaced from the fields of metaphysics,534 the Real might easily be mistaken for a matter of perspective,
giving rise to the misapprehension that what might be judged as reality from a particular perspective, is
530
Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Simulacra and Simulation, 121.
Ibid.
532
Ibid., 122.
533
Ibid., 122-3.
534
That is as a structured field of philosophical inquiry, and not a vague realm beyond physics.
531
106
identical to that which is Real. Equally, it might be inaccurately judged the product of, rather than the
indifferent precondition for, the nexus of relations we habitually call reality. Quentin Meillassoux warns
against such a situation in which facts are incorrectly conflated with facticity, 535 contingent conditions
with necessary conditions.536 A realism dependent on perspective and relation cannot tolerate the
independence and integrity of entities – their being such as they are537 – and presses potentiality itself into
that narrowest and most restrictive of existential containers: human consciousness. The preponderance for
this distinctly anthropocentric understanding of existence – one which systematically suppresses both precognitive and pre-reflective existence – exemplifies a tendency towards self-limitation by virtue of an
understanding of thought as bound to human rather than pure being. Such concerns are not merely
theoretical, however. Turning to minimalism, a considerable amount of the controversy prompted by its
canonical movement arises from the fact that its objects at once claim autonomy and contingency upon
perception, significantly problematizing the relationship between subject and object.
e) A topology of the Real
In the spirit of reconnecting realism and universality, it is necessary to suspend the view of reality as a
correspondence between cause and effect. The Real concerns itself with the non-predicative aspect of
every entity, drawn from the inexhaustible fabric of Being. The realism endorsed here is neither naive,
nor the assertion of some primary quality that is pervasive in certain entities and absent in others. In fact,
“we must uncover an absolute necessity that does not reinstate any form of absolutely necessary
entity.”538 An entity or object is Real not because it is itself absolute, but because there is an Absolute.
The Real accounts for the proximity of the object to the Absolute, without dissolving the one into the
other. Stated in terms of the realism adopted here, there simply can be nothing in existence that is
genuinely beyond the Real; that could not be real in some possible world.
The minimalist aesthetic addresses the doubts which art nowadays habitually raises regarding this type of
ontological realism, despite the fact that, thus defined, there is simply nothing with which to be at odds in
the Real – the Real simply is, without its being attached to any particular predicate. Thus the Real
designates a peculiar type of ontological naturalism which at once grounds and is approximated by the
535
AF, 39-40, 79-80.
Ibid., 36-7, 62, 80.
537
CC, 13-5
538
AF, 34. Italics are Meillassoux‟s.
536
107
aesthetic realm. This is a bold claim, but crucial if we are to comprehend the manner in which
minimalism defines an aperture through which the recuperation of the Real might be pursued.
At this point it is possible to offer a schematic outline of the relationship between Being, existence and
the Real which underpins the present work (Figure 50):539
Figure 50: Topology of the Real with Respect to Being, event and occurrence of entities.
Being does not begin. What we call beginning takes place within the pervasiveness of Being. Being is
pure multiplicity540 and, as such, has no conditions to which it is tied. Being without any condition is
Absolute. It has neither nature nor natural limits. Its temporality is non-specific but linear and
539
Much of the vocabulary of this preliminary schema is adapted from various ontological discussions of Alain
Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Giorgio Agamben, although it cannot be overemphasized that its current form is
as general as it is incomplete – the first tentative step of a larger synthetic project on the one hand, and an attempt to
formulate a novel view of radical realism on the other – and that its graphic representation does not aim accurately
to translate its propositions, but merely to offer a means of rapidly apprehending their dynamic and systemic
interaction. Furthermore, this schema attends only to situations of positive Being.
540
BE, 40-8. Also see Hallward, Badiou, 61-3; Miguel de Beistegui, “The Ontological Dispute: Badiou, Heidegger
and Deleuze,” trans. Ray Brassier, Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: State U
of New York P, 2005), 46-7, 49.
108
irreversible.541 Fluctuations occur in Being542 – events, occurrences, entities – but these are not
fluctuations in Being itself.543 The being of Being, or the multiplicity of multiplicity,544 is Absolutely Real
to the extent that the Real is the mark of that which is beyond any act of positing, point of access, or telos
of interpretation. The Real thus transects Being as a condition for the existence of entities which,
contingently persistent over a period of time, constitute reality. As will subsequently be demonstrated by
reproducing the argumentation of Meillassoux, the only necessity inherent to the Real is that of
contingency: for the Real to persist, contingent entities must emerge or desist, appear or disappear; 545 that
is, must take-place in time. The corollary to this contention is that any beginning – that is, emergence or
appearance of an entity – takes place within the existential field denominated by the Real. Such entities
take place between Being and the Real, in an existential field punctuated by occurrences or points upon
which entities begin to exist, or begin to inexist or disappear. Henceforth, the Real implies the
pervasiveness in Being of the necessity of contingency and the irreversibility of time.
Since it is recognizable principally by its instantiation through entities, it is plausible to suggest that the
Real, in its relation to Being, constitutes an existential field. Once again a corollary applies: every entity
begins by the force of an appearance within the Real; a contingent but irreversible occurrence in the
Real.546 This does not imply that an entity cannot desist, nor that it could not have occurred differently,
but that this occurrence itself, once it has taken-place, cannot be reversed. Such an occurrence may be of
something absolutely new,547 in which case, following Badiou, it might be tied to an event. In its shortest
541
See Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London:
Flamingo, 1985), 7-8.
542
See ibid., 135; SMP, 29. Badiou, “On Subtraction,” 109-10; Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and
James Nielson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995), 13-4.
543
According to Badiou, “being is…multiplicity plucked from the void” (SMP, 29).
544
Badiou, “Question of Being,” 47-8.
545
SMP, 30-2.
546
It is important to distinguish an occurrence within Being, from an event. An occurrence belongs to a logic of
appearance – the advent of a particular organization of relationships, of entities being-there, within Being: for
“being-there, or appearing, consists not of a form of being but of forms of relation,” (SMP, 31), while Badiou
maintains that “[o]ne can reasonably call „logic‟ a formal theory of relations” (ibid). An event, on the other hand
inaugurates absolute novelty precisely to the extent that it is trans-ontological , cutting across the entire order of
Being (Alain Badiou, “The Event as Trans-Being,” TW, 103). An occurrence presents a rupture within Being, while
an event signifies a rupture across Being.
547
The opening of Sam Gillespie‟s The Mathematics of Novelty usefully juxtaposes the views of novelty offered by
Deleuze and Badiou. For the former, being is marked by becoming – at once whole and open to change, and thus
intrinsically “orient[ed]…towards the new (Gillespie, Mathematics, 7). Novelty is thus the product of becoming:
“being continually produces itself anew” (ibid., 5) by means of minute differentiations derived from the repetition
inherent to substantiation, so that “[c]reation is tantamount to the positing of being” (Gillespie, Mathematics, 2). No
essential gap exists between the self-positing and the subjective positing of a concept, so that “everything new has
its origin in an appearing or expression of being‟s innermost potential” (ibid.).
109
version, Alain Badiou defines the event as the inauguration of something totally new and rare, a new
subject in Being, “a point of rupture with respect to being [that] does not exonerate us from thinking the
being of the event itself.”548 In this case an event is trans-ontological – something “which is not being qua
being…which subtracts itself from ontological subtraction.”549 To clarify the topology of an event‟s transbeing – its being both proper to and also subtracted from Being – Badiou claims that, “[i]n effect, an
event is composed of the elements of a site, but also by the event itself, which belongs to itself.”550
According to the Axiom of Foundation, a multiple – the set which indicates contingent coherence across
the ontological and existential fields – cannot be founded on its own elements.551 In every multiple there
is a founding element which is not part of the multiple in question.552 According to Badiou, the sole
exception to this rule is the event which is founded on an element which is also its essential constituent –
an occurrence on the edge of the void.553 While an event itself is an unfounded multiple, for it to be even
momentarily present in Being, it requires some sort of topos to support its upsurge – its “originary
disappearance, supplementing the situation for the duration of a lightning flash.”554 Such an evental site
acts as a foundation for that which cannot be founded.555 Thus the event is unpredictable with respect to
Being, yet undeniably arises in relation to Being. This, Badiou terms, an event‟s trans-being.556 From an
event emerges what Badiou envisages in terms of a subject or truth which has the capacity to organize
and to valorize information in a field of existence.557 Importantly, Badiou limits the definition of truth or
subject to the direct consequences of an event, but stresses that the pure eventality of the event is
irretrievable as such.558
For Badiou, novelty is necessarily marked by “[a]bsolute beginnings,” (ibid., 8) which “derive from nothing” (ibid.,
3) – the void or the empty set, which is the necessary ontological structure for either being or becoming to take
place. Occasionally and unpredictably, events erupt from the void, disrupting an existing situation, constituting a
novel field (a subjective fidelity to the generic progress of a truth-procedure). These “ruptures or breaks within
knowledge…force us to redefine our general categories and standards of determination” (ibid., 3) and, according to
Badiou, present the possibility of genuine novelty in the fields of politics – the four conditions of philosophy within
which thought seems eminently capable of tracing its consequences (MP, 34-5).
548
Badiou, “Event as Trans-Being,” 100.
549
Ibid. See BE, 189-90.
550
Badiou, “Event as Trans-Being,” 103.
551
“[T[he non-void set is founded inasmuch as a multiple always belongs to it which is Other than it” (BE, 186).
552
Badiou, “Event as Trans-Being,” 102. “[T]here is at least one element that „founds‟ this multiple, in the following
sense: there is an element that has no elements in common with the initial multiple” (ibid.).
553
Ibid., 101; BE, 175.
554
Badiou, “Truth,” 124.
555
BE, 175.
556
Badiou, “Event as Trans-Being,” 102-3; BE, 173-6, 185-7.
557
Badiou, “Truth,” 127; MP, 85.
558
“Let an event have taken place – it will, as such, have vanished…incapable of setting in or of lasting. All that
remains are its consequences, among which is that defining the eventual value of the site” (SMP, 83).
110
Much more common than events are occurrences – those changes within a given situation of existence
derived from rearranging its elements. Through occurrences, entities come into existence as well as desist
or inexist. These nascent entities, which we might hesitantly denominate ordinary subjects and objects,
are not absolutely new in the strictest sense, but often take on the appearance of novel objects.559 We
might say that the point at which such an entity, in defining its relation to the Real, intersects with the
progress of a truth, is the point at which the entity expresses its fidelity to a truth – to an event having
taken place. To paraphrase, the occurrence of entities in a situation presents the basic existential material
which an event (as distinct from an occurrence) potentially reorganizes. Such occurrences also define the
poietic substance of art. Where events transect Being, occurrences transect existence. Again we are
reminded that entities confirm the distinction of existence from Being, and that this confirmation is
subtracted from Being without reducing its essential multiplicity.
While both event and occurrence concern the Real, only the former is strictly aleatory,560 and retains a
degree of indifference to human existence. To be clear, Badiou maintains that an event can only be known
retroactively through the relation of an historical situation.561 However, if it is not the event itself which is
known historically, but rather the site and consequences of its taking-place, it does not follow that such an
event would necessarily be bound to anthropocentrism, nor that it would be impossible for events to occur
in nature.562 To this extent the present work expresses some doubt regarding Badiou‟s procedural vision.
This said, since an event is transitory and can finally be attested to only retrospectively, it must be
approached from within a given existential situation.563 Thus the comprehension of novelty is
inconceivable without the point which separates existence from inexistence, appearance from
disappearance, and entities from non-entities.
Most significant for the present is that existence is coincidental with the emergence of Real entities. If it is
possible to assert that something exists, then it is an entity. The Real, admitted in this sense and contra
Baudrillard‟s assertion, opposes the inertia which anaesthetizes everyday reality rather than succumbing
to it. It reveals the operations by which Real objects are often subjugated to forces such as history and
context, which seldom recognize their ontological autonomy. As Bruno Latour recognizes, history and
559
See Gillespie, Mathematics, 7-8.
BE, 191, 193
561
BE, 179. Badiou suggests that “[i]t is rational to think the ab-normal or the anti-natural, that is, history, as an
omnipresence of singularity” (ibid., 174).
562
BE, 174, 177-9, 187-8.
563
BE, 178.
560
111
context become truly “visible only by the traces [they] leave[…] when a new association is being
produced between elements”564 not intrinsically related. We are thus warned against the inertia565 of fixing
the Real in terms of a set of historical predicates. Existence enjoins us to accommodate simultaneously
the irreversible temporality of the Real, and the multiple and often contradictory temporal trajectories of
entities. The Real entity extends itself across contingent and contradictory multiples – the innumerable
fluctuating metabolic times of organisms, as well as those of aesthetic entities.
To grasp that the Real discovers no final predicate, yet still is instantiated in every entity – and with
particular clarity in entities which self-reflexively uncover the minimal conditions of their own poietic
emergence and persistence – is to recognize that every entity participates in, but only approximates, the
Real. I submit that this point of recognition characterizes the moment at which an entity is subtracted, or
subtracts itself, from Being – the point at which a work appears or disappears, exists or inexists. Here,
upon this minimal distinction, poietic Being takes on its full force, and the relation of art to the Real is at
its most intense. This speculative proposition might be stated as follows: when self-reflexive interrogation
is simultaneously a reflection on the nature of the Real, then we might say that thought thinks itself as the
minimal subtraction of existence from Being, or, in other words, the most minimal entity possible.
f) The persistence of the Real
The Real persists. This is its most abiding feature. Entities may or may not come into existence – such is
the universal condition of their contingency – and so partake, or not partake, of the Real. In either case,
the contingency of their existential status does not affect the Real as such. It is true that the contingent
part of any entity might reside in its material, conceptual or perceptual composition, and that it is these
contingencies which charge the potential of every entity. Such contingencies would be impossible,
however, if there were not some principle to which they appeal which is itself not contingent, but which is
the persistent ground upon which basis entities are capable of persisting. For Meillassoux, this persistent
ground is the force of contingency itself.566 In this light, persistence is understood to indicate the most
564
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 8.
Latour, an exponent of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which might (amongst many other equally plausible
descriptors) be characterized as “a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers
together into new shapes” in order to constitute a sociology, which, although in many ways different from the
present proposition, is similarly opposed to formulations which mistake context for causality (ibid., 5-7).
565
Ibid., 66-7, 75, 85.
566
“[C]ontingency is necessary , and hence eternal...[and] contingency alone is necessary” (AF, 65).
112
intrinsic part of any entity567 which exists as a contingent quantity across a period of time. That which
persists in an entity, does so insofar as it implies the Real, accepting which, the Real and contingency are
in fact inextricable.
Returning to the central thesis – that minimalism exemplifies the facticity and persistence of the Real – it
is clearer what is intended by the term persistence and its connection to the Real. At this point it is
possible to suggest that minimalism persists precisely to the extent that it is complicit with the Real.
Regardless of the analytical and theoretical vocabulary within which minimalism is investigated, it gives
up the same secret, which is no secret at all. The minimalist object exposes objecthood in itself as both the
source and the target of its aesthetic. Minimalism clarifies the Real precisely to the extent that its objects
adhere to and also exemplify the existential mould of the austere brand of realism currently under
consideration.
The incapacity of minimalist objects to be other than they are is the pivot upon which their aesthetic
turns.568 Minimalism is focused through its objects – not in the sense that a particular object maintains a
particular referential relation to a universe of significance, association, or meaning, but in the fact that it is
an object. The pervasive condition, exhibited in every minimalist object, is its capacity to “allow…a
contingency to be.”569 It is this sole realization – that things could have been different, yet that they are
not – that renders contingent entities factical, and every fact contingent except the fact of contingency
itself. Contingency is absolute and cannot itself be reduced to a contingent situation.570 This is merely an
approximation of Meillassoux‟s argument, discussed below, which inaugurates a route between the
Absolute and the Real. My contention is that for a minimalist object not to be as it is, it must not be at all.
In other words, minimalism testifies to contingency at a radical, ontological level, rather than at the level
of the correspondences which culminate in the proposition of its identity.
Minimalism exists in such a way as to intensify the Real by exposing through its most singular property –
being such as it is – the various forces of poietic generation: of creation and decreation, of emergence and
recession, of appearance and disappearance. Yet, if this is its overwhelming sense, an immediate problem
567
This intimate force underpins even the possibility of the generation of entities, regardless of whether in an
aesthetic field dominated by human consciousness and technology, or through the activity of natural objects and
processes themselves.
568
“Creation – or existence – is not the victorious struggle of a power to be against a power to not-be,” notes
Agamben. “[I]t is rather the impotence of God with respect to his own impotence, his allowing – being able to not
not-be – a contingency to be” (CC, 32).
569
Ibid.
570
AF, 80.
113
arises as to where, precisely, such a force might be located. Of course, one such location is the minimalist
object itself. Yet, to the extent that minimalism habitually eschews all external reference, its locus is
finally atopian – neither properly material nor conceptual, but contained within a self-reflexive non-space
beyond that which is given in the ordinary topology of objects.
The manner in which such minimalist atopoi intensify our recognition of the Real is of considerable
significance. Several postulations might be offered in this regard: first, that since the Real is the
continuous part of every entity, neither arising nor receding with respect to this entity, it (the Real)
necessarily coincides with what is intended by persistence; secondly, accepting that the Real here defines
a field within which every entity arises, that it (the Real) can evidently not be contained in an entity, as in
this case it would only be knowable to itself, and would be limited to the manifestation of the entity; third,
that if the Real is not contained within an entity, yet is still continuous with that entity, that it must in
some sense manifest beside this entity – at once indissociable from the entity, yet apart from its
apprehension, interpretation, or explanation. A mode of being which operates beside an entity, while
remaining proper to the same entity, might be called a para-ontology. It is through a para-ontology that an
entity exhibits the minimal conditions of its autonomy qua objecthood – its paradigmicity, “show[ing]
„beside itself‟...both its own intelligibility and that of the class it constitutes.”571
Understanding minimalism in para-ontological terms allows us to approach the object from two
perspectives at once: the first strives to guarantee the Real qua Being – the very pervasiveness of
multiplicity from which an entity is subtracted; the other testifies to the Real qua existence – the manner
in which entities are presented. In describing the subtraction of existential entities from Being, such a
para-ontology approaches the very heart of poiesis itself. Minimalism seeks something more Real than
any mimetic logic can admit: the persistent ground of that which makes something knowable as an entity
in the first instance, and the para-ontological or exemplary conditions which define the entity by its
taking-place such as it is.
g) The facticity of the Real
571
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things, trans. Luca D‟Isanto with Kevin Attell (New York: Zone, 2009),
24.
114
For the Real as it is posited here to gain credibility, it is necessary to overcome the paradox that the
“realist always has to posit some more concepts to prove he has accessed pre-conceptual reality.”572 The
realization that absolute necessity exists because of and not despite the fact that there is no entity that is
absolutely necessary – either in itself, or as it is related within a set of determinate laws – is what
reinvigorates such a realism. In other words an entity is Real precisely because it is entirely contingent; its
existence is only imperfectly accounted for by any determinate structure. To construct a compelling case
for the revivification of realism, Quentin Meillassoux explains his fundamental objection to what he terms
correlationism – an idea in modern thought573 which insists that “we only ever have access574 to the
correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”575
Although Meillassoux distinguishes several manifestations of this correlation, the one most significant to
the present argument is that which maintains that it is finally impossible to conceptualize objects
independently of subjects, in which case it is impossible to formulate a convincing account of an entity
which exists entirely autonomously, or in-itself.576 The manner in which access is granted to objects is of
prime significance in this regard. In brief, correlationism suppresses the possibility of an entity existing
in-itself and affirms that all entities exist in terms of the access which is granted to them, and thus only
inasmuch as they exist for-us.577 Meillassoux‟s refutation of correlationism is advanced through a formal
proof that the correlationist rejection of realism rests on an inaccurate dismissal of the absolute. His
recuperation of the absolute requires that we hold to two principal points. The first asserts ancestrality –
“reality anterior to the emergence of the human species”578 – which is indicated by the existence of archefossils or objects expressing the “givenness of a being anterior to its givenness.” 579 Arche-fossils can be
proven to exist independently, both by logic580 and with respect to the laws of physics.581 The second
572
SRM, 422.
Correlationism is thus the name he gives to the principal thrust of modern philosophical thought – from
Kantianism, Hegelianism and Idealism, through the phenomenological tradition, principally of Nietzsche, Husserl
and Heidegger, to ordinary language philosophy and those versions of analytic and postmodern philosophy made
possible in its wake (AF, 5-8).
574
The italics here are my emphasis.
575
Quentin Meillassoux, AF, 5.
576
AF 3-5. The terms in-itself and for-us are most famously used by Sartre, whose existentialism is in most senses
diametrically opposed to Meillassoux‟s project. See page 205 of the present work.
577
Ibid. See also SR, 409, 416-7, 426-8; Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London:
Palgrave, 2007), 64-7.
578
AF, 10.
579
Ibid., 14.
580
Ibid., 10-9.
581
As Meillassoux notes, “[d]ating became „absolute‟ with the perfection of techniques...that allowed the scientist to
determine the actual duration of the measured object” (AF, 9).
573
115
point involves the systematic reversal of the traditional opposition of necessity and contingency, arguing
that the sole necessity in Being is contingency itself.582
From this position Meillassoux applies himself systematically to the task of demonstrating that a minimal
presupposition of absolute autonomy resides in every claim of inter-dependence: thus, the manner in
which for-us, access-oriented correlationism exists includes some element of the in-itself. This
demonstration requires the clarification of two further terms fundamental to Meillassoux‟s thought:
contingency and fact. In Brassier‟s summation,
[c]ontingency is empirical and pertains to phenomena: a phenomenon is contingent if it can come into
out of existence without violating the principles of cognition that govern phenomena. Facticity
transcendental and pertains to our cognitive relation to phenomena, and hence to the principles
knowledge themselves, concerning which it makes no sense to say either that they are necessary
contingent, since we have no other principle to compare them to. 583
or
is
of
or
Meillassoux insists that there is no way of asserting the transcendentality of the factial 584 relation except
through an ultimate self-contradiction, by falling back on an absolutization of facticity, of its being
neither necessary nor contingent. Asserting an absolute, however, has the contradictory implication of
deciding as to the necessity of contingency. In this case, what was meant to remain undecidable – that
facticity could not decide between contingency and necessity – effectively asserts that “the contingency or
groundlessness of the for-us (the correlation)…becomes in-itself or necessary precisely insofar as its
contingency is not something which is merely for-us.”585 In other words, fact absolutized as the condition
of indecision, decides as to the necessity only of contingency. In the most direct terms possible, this
compels the acknowledgement that there is a Real outside of the claim that reality cannot distinguish
between subject and object.
It is necessary to retrace the most essential points of Meillassoux‟s argument. His first claim is
ontological, derived from what he might recognise in terms of Heideggerian strong correlationism – the
582
Ibid., 78-81. As Harman notes, Meillassoux is “doubting the Principle of Sufficient Reason while keeping the
concept of non-contradiction and he‟s thereby doubting necessity” (SRH, 385-6).
583
Brassier, Nihil, 66.
584
Meillassoux distinguishes between facticity and the factical on the one hand, and factiality and the factial on the
other. The latter refers to “the speculative essence of facticity, viz., that the facticity of every thing cannot be thought
as a fact. Thus factiality must be understood as the non-facticity of the fact” (AF, 79). The present work follows this
distinction, although since its primary concern is with existential presentation, references are for the most part to
facticity, and hence the factual and factical.
585
Brassier, Nihil, 67.
116
“necessity for everything that is [that exists in being] to be a fact.”586 If something is, it is a fact in relation
to some determinate principle or law which confirms that it is: it exists, and it is factual with regard to this
existence. Facticity refers “not [to] an objective reality, but rather [to] the unsurpassable limits of
objectivity confronted with the fact that there is a world; a world that is describable and perceptible, and
structured by determinate invariants.”587
This is a properly ontological contention, and, as has been suggested, facticity should not be confused
with knowledge as such. Thus, Meillassoux is able to maintain that the “facticity of every thing cannot be
thought of as a fact,”588 since this would introduce an insurmountable logical and ontological
contradiction; it would precisely reduce facticity (non-contingency) to the realm of knowledge, which
itself is, according to the correlationist argument, contingent. In such a case, the contingency of
contingency itself would be affirmed, the insistence upon which would be disastrous for ontology, as
Meillassoux notes,589 since it implies that infinite regress is the acceptable fate of every analytical
endeavour. If this were the case, then determination of what counts as knowledge could potentially rest
solely upon dogmatic decisions as to the reality or unreality of one thing over another and, terrifyingly,
even the conservation or destruction of such real or unreal things.
Meillassoux provides significant opposition to the idea that infinite regress or circularity are unfortunate
but inevitable consequences of accurate analysis. Such resistance – the persistence of the Real against its
possible reduction to any particular reality or nexus of realities – is confirmed by Meillassoux‟s
affirmation of the “non-factual essence of the fact.”590 According to this claim, at the centre of any fact, of
anything that is or is knowable as existence in Being, there resides something radically unstable. Such
instability is not the result of any failure to articulate some spectral essence or errant identitarian core, but
is the very basis of ontology, the Real, as well as any expression of these last terms in any possible reality.
One of his primary conclusions is thus that “only facticity is not factual – viz., only the contingency of
what is, is not itself contingent,”591 and he proceeds to clarify that this “does not claim that contingency is
necessary; its precise claim is that contingency alone is necessary – and only this prevents it from being
586
AF, 79.
Ibid., 40.
588
Ibid., 79.
589
SR, 437.
590
AF, 79.
591
Ibid., 80.
587
117
metaphysical. For the statement, „contingency is necessary‟ is in fact entirely compatible with
metaphysics.”592
The significance of this argument for the present work is that it expresses the urgency of determining the
theoretical parameters of the Real – the means of its communication, exemplification and effectiveness –
through objects in the world. Where the majority of contemporary philosophical discourses “forbid[...]
any possibility of a conceptual discourse about the Real in itself,”593 Meillassoux advocates the
reconnection of the Real to various forms of realism.594
Minimalism, I claim, offers a legitimate exemplar of such a speculative realism – exemplifying, without
subduing, the Real. The pursuit of realism should not, however, distract us from the recognition,
increasingly felt across quite different spheres of knowledge production and testing, that there exists “a
lack of reason of any reality; that is, the impossibility of giving an ultimate ground to the existence of any
being. We can reach conditional necessity, but never absolute necessity.”595 In the place of the absolute
necessity of any entity, Meillassoux absolutizes facticity itself. He proposes a Principle of Factiality,596
asserting through this principle “the speculative essence of facticity.”597 Meillassoux contends that
everything that is, is a fact. In terms more familiar, being qua existence is factual; it can be reflected with
relative accuracy by facts which present the “structural invariants” of existence.598 Facts, however, are not
necessary to being qua being. While facticity prompts us “to grasp the „possibility‟ of that which is
wholly other to the world, but which resides in the midst of the world as such”599 – Being, or pure
multiplicity – it does so by revealing the impossibility of exchanging any set of facts for Being itself.600
Facts are finally products of conditional necessity, conditioned by determinate laws rather than absolute
necessity. To paraphrase: the relationship between rule or law and its predicate in terms of fact is,
therefore, one of conditional necessity rather than absolute necessity. For example, that gravity is a law to
which all matter bends appears only as absolute necessity once one has accepted that relative stability is
the mark of existence. Of course, in such a case the consequences of asserting contingency where
592
Ibid.
SR, 434-5.
594
Ibid., 435.
595
Ibid., 428-9.
596
The distinction between factuality and facticity might be characterized as follows: factuality is facticity in its
relation to fact, whereas facticity is just the fact-ness of a fact.
597
AF, 79.
598
Ibid., 39.
599
Ibid., 40.
600
Ibid.
593
118
presently stability persists, are existentially catastrophic. However, the configurations which tie
potentiality to obligation are ethical rather than ontological, and finally there may be no absolutely
compelling reason to suppose that no world could exist at all outside of the contingencies which currently
reign.
Assumptions in this regard are doubtless conditioned by the reign of correlationism, a consequence of
which might be formulated in the claim that it is impossible to conceive of a world convincingly outside
of the relation between thought and that which it thinks; outside of the correlation of thought and being.
To break with this dogma is to recognize that all which is fact for us is contingent, but that this
contingency itself, the facticity of the fact, is both absolute and necessary.601 Accordingly, there exist no
necessary, universal laws, with the sole exception of the law which affirms that there is no necessary
universality to any law. “[C]ontingency and only contingency, is absolutely necessary. Facticity, and only
facticity, is not factual, but eternal. Facticity is not a fact, it is not „one more‟ fact in the world…[T]o be is
to be factual – and this is not a fact.”602 Regarding determinate entities as they relate to determinate laws,
we are enjoined either to trace painstakingly the conditions which define the emergence of facts603 – the
potential passages between entity and knowledge – or to affirm the unity and independence of the entity
as such. In this light, it is of considerable significance that the Real exhibits the compossibility of decision
and the undecidable, the axiomatic and non-axiomatic, the contingent and the absolute.604 In either case,
our relation to contingency is drawn beyond passive withdrawal to the contingent but positive takingplace of Real entities in irreversible time.
h) A minimalist realism
The Real, as it is formulated above, makes clear claims as to its affinities with both pre-scientific realism
– it conforms to the commonplace regarding the separateness of entities – as well as scientific realism, in
a sense merely paraphrasing what science demonstrates experimentally regarding the interaction of origin,
time and object. As it is offered here, the Real is explicitly minimal, and it is the shared desire for clarity
and presence which binds it convincingly to the minimalist aesthetic. Minimalism presents a
radicalization of that to which Badiou alludes in terms of a “[d]istancing – conceived as the way that
601
Ibid., 79-80.
SRM, 432.
603
Ibid.
604
Ibid.
602
119
semblance works out its proper distance from the real – [which] can be taken as an axiom of [recent]
art...a reflexive art, an art that wants to exhibit its own process, an art that wants visibly to idealize its own
materiality.”605 For minimalists, the minimal displacement between the fundamental quantity of an entity
and its existential vocation qua art – that is, its marking the transumptive mediation of the very force of
poiesis – instantiates at once the passion for the Real and the concern with proper distance which Badiou
recognizes as central traits of contemporaneity. Minimalism offers arguably the most direct of the many
aesthetic “attempt[s] to devise transparent, self-regulating forms of thought whose only occasion, in the
absence of any object that they might represent or interpret, is an encounter with the generic nudity of the
real.”606 That the parameters of reality are as often set ideologically as by any force of metaphysics,
reinforces the distinctive indifference of the Real. Thus we approach Norris‟ claim regarding “Badiou‟s
realist ontology...[that] a situation is in no way dependent on what we may perceive, recognize, believe or
take ourselves to know concerning it.”607
The present formulation of the Real – although more reductive in its presentation – shares a great deal
with the propositions of Meillassoux, Badiou and Norris on this subject. Norris is particularly concerned
to reconcile scientific realism with those accounts which discern the Real from within the realm of
cultural production. Too often are the latter dismissed arbitrarily as anti-realists on the assumption that all
subscribe to a paradoxically dogmatic relativism – one which “assume[s] the priority of language over
thought and of thought in its diverse, linguistically articulated modes over anything pertaining to the
nature or structure of mind-independent reality.”608 Accepting this, relativists are able to justify that
“„reality‟ just is coextensive with or restricted to the domain of known, verifiable, reliably vouchsafed,
well-documented, adequately sourced, or at any rate sufficiently agreed-upon historical facts.”609 That a
suspicion regarding the absolute – such as that entertained by deconstruction – should so often be
mistaken for an absolute refusal of the fact that such practices habitually remain “anchored firmly in
certain properties of the physical or natural world and in certain likewise robust phenomenological
truths,”610 owes finally to the acceleration of anti-realism from a logical to a dogmatic position.611
605
Alain Badiou The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 49-50.
Hallward, Badiou, xxx.
607
Norris, Badiou, 62.
608
Ibid., 213.
609
Christopher Norris, Re-Thinking the Cogito: Naturalism, Reason and the Venture of Thought (London and New
York: Continuum, 2010), 212.
610
Ibid., 225.
611
Ibid., 217.
606
120
The present recuperation of the absolute – derived in equal part from the work of Meillassoux and the
taking-place of minimalist objects – is similarly opposed to such dogmatism. To recall: that which is
Real, is; and that which is, is absolutely contingent. However, if we understand properly what is intended
by absolute contingency, it becomes clear that what could have been otherwise is not otherwise – it is as it
is in a particular situation. For this reason, it does not follow that if what is, is absolutely contingent, that
the Real is also absolutely contingent. Rather, the Real is what is necessary to an entity‟s existence in
order for it to be such as it is. Since it is understood that Being is also necessary to existence, there exists
a modal argument for considering the Real as transecting Being and existence. Briefly phrased, the Real is
the manner in which Being makes itself known within the immanence of existence.
In short, Being qua being supervenes upon any expression or situation of being (for example, a situation,
an object, an identity, and so on), but any expression or situation of being does not supervene upon Being
itself. Similarly, the Real supervenes upon any possible expression of a reality, but reality does not
supervene upon the Real. In other words, just as specific beings or existents participate in Being in
general, but cannot themselves constitute or reconstitute Being in general, so subjects, objects, things and
processes, which together constitute descriptions of reality, participate in the Real, but cannot themselves
constitute or reconstitute the Real. Indeed, we might paraphrase this by a conceptually difficult, but
crucial, paradox: that which in any entity is genuinely transcendental is in fact immanent to the same
entity. That, in practice, the transcendental is always subject to the conditions of objectal immanence,
explains how the most frequent, if spurious, attacks on realism tend to reject the notion of ontological
presence altogether. Once its factical conditions are divorced from the immanence of its objects, the Real
is unable to resist the reduction of its ontological concerns to various sets of epistemic conditions.
Thus it remains paramount that the Real be distinguished from its instantiation in objectal terms –
discerned in the material terms of the exemplary field upon which existential contingency unfolds within
an irreversible temporal continuum. It is this field which I claim, at least in part, for the minimalist
enterprise. As has been argued, the numerous configurations of reality define existence in the orbit of the
Real, to which extent they remain contingent upon the Real. Such reality is always subject to the laws of
contingency, however, and does not itself produce the force of contingency as such. Thus we are returned
to Meillassoux‟s thesis: that everything is contingent except contingency itself, which solely is necessary
and hence absolute. The Real, defined as the necessity of contingency apprehended within the persistence
of time, attempts to comprehend the absolute in motion. It is to this possibility which the minimalist
121
aesthetic attends in terms of transumption: poiesis apprehended at its most radical location in the very
midst of its instantiation as quantity.
122
PART TWO: MINIMALISM AS QUANTITATIVE ONTOLOGY
6. MINIMALISM AS QUANTITATIVE BEING
a) Counting and the experience of existence
One of the clearest memories of my early years involves a seven-hour return journey with my parents and
sister from a seaside holiday. Such journeys so often seem marked by an intense combination of
excitement and regret, anticipation and melancholy. It was Good Friday. I know this because interrupting
another of my failed attempts to prove that if one stares at the sun without blinking or looking away for
more than ten seconds it would cease to be bright, was the closing reminder of a religious radio broadcast:
that the Crucifixion had taken place from twelve to three. This was followed by the midday news. I
assume that general mindfulness was what the broadcaster was after. However, for one of those reasons
which are senseless to all but children in such arbitrary situations, I decided to attempt to count to a
million in those three hours, convinced, of course, that this was perfectly achievable.
As my imagination surged towards this huge target, the torrential count became increasingly incoherent.
The mental sounding and visualization of numbers merged until I was no longer sure whether or not I was
making any progress. I began again, slowly, then a little faster, then was lost again. Despite the ferocious
determination of the count, I never got to a thousand. I abandoned the attempt after half an hour.
Whatever association had temporarily flared between religion as achievable infinity subsided abruptly.
If the emotional complexity of that day has rendered its memories unusually clear, this lucidity has also
allowed me to reflect on this precise moment as one of some significance. Mathematical possibility had,
to this point, been easily predicable – imminent additions and subtraction of apples and so forth; concrete
things. Suddenly it had become abstract. I understood and accepted that a million was possible, but I
could only conceive it stratospherically, in some unreachable possibility – possible somewhere else and
for someone else also. Henceforth, mathematics would be predicated in the ether, away from this concrete
world or its systems of knowledge production – their unremitting emphasis on solution and equation,
predication and proof – within which such abstraction was unwittingly affirmed. For what keeps this
massive count grounded is that we accept that it simply is. Accepting this facticity of numerical
123
accumulation uncritically is not, however, a question of acceding to the base quantity of being, but
precisely rebranding this quantity as an ultimately desirable quality. “That number must rule, that the
imperative must be: „count!‟ – who doubts this today?” asks Badiou. “For, under the current empire of
number, it is not a question of thought, but of realities.”612
I think back to that day, that specific hour, and it is hard not to discern the Platonic echo of the situation
and its consequences.613 A boy stares into the sun. He is young enough still to possess that intrepid,
experimental naivety that does not apprehend an imminent limitation to knowledge and knowability. He
stares and believes he can fully grasp its generative power: more than grasp – objectify, unify, even
domesticate. He dreams of some sort of control in a world that always seems to realize itself too
haphazardly, too slowly. The force of his gaze is frustrated, but not thwarted. The desire behind this force
migrates. The singular quantity, totality, the One, is sought now through a process of quantification. The
count of a massive number, one million, is the only approximation in the undermarked memory of the boy
that might approach the infinite dimension of the sun in its productive capacity – both the beginning and
end of form and formation; the very possibility of Form itself. This number proves unattainable. The
failed apprehension of an immanent, original quantity, the One, the correlate of an absolute Form, is
compounded by a second failure to approach the One through quantification or approximation. Thus I
became unwittingly an appellant to the essential axiom of ontology, according to Badiou: “the One is
not.”614
I am tempted to say that at an early age I was subject to a Platonic disappointment of sorts, since which
the force purported to underpin the One has always seemed disappointingly fragmentary. However,
disenchantment on one level – the loss of accessibility to the relation between number, mathematical
612
Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 1. Hereafter NN.
I refer here, in a rather free-spirited way, to Plato‟s use of the sun to illustrate that Form is both that which
coheres in experience, and also that which provides coherence to experience (Plato, “Republic,” trans. G.M.A.
Grube and C.D.C. Reeve, Plato Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1997), 1128-1132.
614
BE, 23. Badiou traces the concept of the One to the Classical Greek thinking of number, arguing that the
impediments presented by the infinite, the concept of zero, and the contemporary obligation to accept the
multiplicity of being, compel a modern rethinking of the substance of number, which itself takes three forms: logical
(Frege and Russell), which fails to come to grips with the conditions of thought itself; formalist (Peano and Hilbert)
which, because entirely rule-governed, is too easily deployed as technique; set-theoretical (Dedekind, Cantor,
Zermelo, Gödel) which Badiou favours for its ability to come to terms with the possibility of pure multiplicity, albeit
many of its practical applications remain to be extrapolated (NN, 7-9, 11). If Unity (the One) is negated, it merely
gives way to various processes of normative unification, of contingent stabilization, which Badiou refers to as that
which “count[s]-as-one” (BE, 24). A crucial caveat must be added at this point regarding terminology: while the
present work prefers the term quantitative principally for clarity it offers when opposed to quality, Badiou is specific
in qualifying its use so as to avoid a Kantian understanding of the denumerability of Being (BE, 265-9).
613
124
operation and world – spelled re-enchantment on another. Over the course of my education, my
mathematical skills were subject to the average fluctuations. There were concepts and operations which
struck a chord, and others that were profoundly bewildering. If that day inaugurated a numerical
disappointment, it is one that ultimately may be universal as much as it is mine. Perhaps such numerical
disappointment is a condition not only characteristic of western culture, but even of being in general and
of the knowledge of such being, reflective of an unavoidable tension between the boundedness of entities
and the infinity of number.
It requires no great skill of observation to affirm that the importance of numericity, as well as its potential
divisiveness, is marked repeatedly in western education – in the quantitative pull of the mathematical and
hard sciences from the qualitative magnetism of the cultural field. It is possible here to endorse, if only
broadly and in passing, Aristotle‟s distinction: that quantity is that which “is divisible into intrinsic parts
each of which has by constitution a sort of unity or thisness,”615 whereas quality is essentially the positive
or negative attributes of quantity.616 We habitually take sides in a manner which allows quantity to
indicate the amount and magnitude inherent in being, claiming this as prerequisite for the emergence and
determination of quality, or specific properties which orient an entity within being. Within the processes
which we conventionally associate with the cultivation of the mind, the results seem dismayingly
predictable: those interested in the sciences tend to quantify the cultural sphere, and those interested in the
cultural tend to qualify the scientific. The sufficiency of either quantity or quality is doubtful, and neither
can be defined functionally within an existential context in the absence of the other. If it remains an
urgent task to criticize the reign which quantity exercises, most obviously through the various techniques
of capitalism, the solution is surely not simply to elevate quality in its place.
All of this threatens to miss one crucial aspect, a point that is intimately tied to a contemporary reassertion
of realism. The ontological predominance of quantity holds precisely to the extent that the absolute is the
product of neither a naive realism, nor an absolute idealism. This recalls the recent work of Meillassoux
discussed above, which argues that that it is only contingency itself that is not contingent, and hence
absolute. “[O]nly facticity is not factual – viz., only the contingency of what is, is not itself
contingent…[which] does not claim that contingency is necessary; its precise claim is that contingency
alone is necessary – and only this prevents it from being metaphysical.”617 Within such a realist ontology,
objects are once again free to be objects – Real quantities – without simply disregarding their qualitative
615
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1998), 134.
Ibid., 135-6.
617
AF, 80.
616
125
dimension. What is Real simply is, and is indifferent to its own affirmation or negation, or any particular
sense in which it might be known. That this proposition might be challenged by denying the possibility of
the Real as a basis for any categorical thought, is only compounded when we consider that even
competing arguments in favour of privileging ontology have habitually veered away from quantity: from
the emphasis on substance in various orthodox materialisms and naïve realisms, through the qualitative
bias of much phenomenology, to the Heideggerian or Deleuzian endorsement of becoming.
If few are unaware of the brutal aspect of quantity and its potential consequences, recognizing its
ontological pre-eminence seems to have been largely subverted by the understanding that being is simply
unthinkable without the qualification that “a world-in-itself, subsisting independently of our relation to it,
is an absurdity.”618 Whether this is the Cartesian connectedness of thought and being, or the vitalist or
existentialist understanding of being-in-the-world,619 what remains essentially unchallenged is the
submission of ontology to epistemology; of the conditions of being to the conditions of knowledge
regarding being. The proclivity for scientific and methodological advancement, and the various attendant
fields of knowledge which have accompanied the rise of epistemology, bring their own range of
inconsistencies and problems. This modern disposition, which Simon Critchley characterizes as beginning
in disappointment,620 is one that is pervaded by ontologico-political nihilism. We are enveloped by a
growing sense of “the meaninglessness of reality, or rather its essential unreality, which inspires either
passive withdrawal or violent destruction.”621
Opposing this nihilism becomes paramount, and if we no longer can affirm a simple transcendental
solution, this does not render Critchley‟s assertion – that we must “face up to the hard reality of the
world”622 – simply naive. In attempting to forward suitable consolation, it seems to me that too few
recognize that the key to undoing this pervasive pessimism lies in an ontological proposition most often
dismissed as the province of naïve realism: that the ground of being is prior to affirmation or negation;
prior and indifferent to the complication of qualification. This priority I here identify with the persistence
of quantity within the Real. What persists in the Real is also antecedent to any specific qualities or
significance that any real object might possess, and this is its absolute quantity; atopian, without location,
and affirmed principally through the mirage of self-reflexivity. It is in the field of minimalist aesthetics
618
Brassier, Nihil, 50.
Ibid., 50-1.
620
Critchley, Very Little, 2-3; Simon Critchley, Infinite Demanding: Ethics of resistance, politics of commitment
(London: Verso, 2007), 1-3.
621
Ibid., 6.
622
Ibid.
619
126
that I identify the objects most capable of attesting to these conditions with consistency and force. In this
light, I suggest that much minimalism mirrors what we might call the conditions of a quantitative
ontology.
b) The loss of quantity and the ascendency of quality in the understanding of ontology
When I recall my disappointment that Good Friday and the failure of my count – the failed unification or
quantification of being – I return also to an exemplary rehearsal of the surrender of quantity to quality.
The awful cost of such situations resides not in this acquiescence itself, but in that a refusal of the
quantitative basis of ontology allows quantity to return as a destructive protocol – as the sole logic of both
being and existence. In failing to recognize precisely when our lives have been reduced to mere being as a
number, we effectively reinstate our being-as-quantity as the primary quality of existence. Badiou
identifies five pervasive examples through which numerical being dominates: the political, the
institutionalization of knowledge acquisition, cultural representation, economy, and the existential notion
of being human.623 The recognition of a quantitative ontology – that being is predicated on magnitude,
quantity, and number – in no sense advocates a world in which quality is suppressed. Badiou‟s lament,
that “we don‟t know what a number is, so we don‟t know what we are,”624 must be understood thus in
terms of affirming quantification against its wholesale betrayal to qualification. In failing to grasp number
in itself, we expose the danger of glossing over the quantitative aspect of ontology, of reducing being to
just another number, a reduction which can subsequently be applied to endorse, indeed to qualify,
particular qualities, ideologies, or situations. The turn away from number spells the ruthless return of
number, and quantity comes insidiously to dominate existence, to predicate our disappointment, not as an
ontological principle, but as the tragic marker of our inability to harness the quantitative force of ontology
itself against the absolute quantification of existence.
It is an error to assume, on the basis of the existential threat posed by actual infinity (which finds its
mathematical proof in set theory625) and the vastness of quantity, that being might simply be recalculated
in qualitative terms. Quality, it is true, dominates the moment we orient our engagement with an external
world based on the dogmatic acceptance of this externality. “Only as phenomenology is ontology
623
NN, 2-3.
Ibid.
625
Hallward, Badiou, 328-34.
624
127
possible,”626 Heidegger famously assures us; but if it is possible to agree with the many and profound
consequences which stem from his painstaking analysis of covered-up-ness as antithesis to Being, it is
more difficult, in the light of the realist commitment of this work, to accept interpretation as the pivot
upon which the relation between phenomena, human being, and Being depends.627 Affirming the
externality of the phenomenon to Being, and that Being must henceforth discover some sort of
qualification, serves to coordinate the suppression of a quantitative ontology. It is in returning to
ontological quantity – with caution and without naivety – that the persistence of minimalism proves
indispensable.
c) Sustenance and silence
Given that the work of its most celebrated exponents is intimately concerned with testifying to
quantitative being, it is unsurprising that I claim for minimalism a peculiar exemplarity in this regard.
Edward Strickland draws attention to the problems associated with any attempt at an uncomplicated
definition of minimalism in terms of chronology, the affiliation of artists, or even the primacy of certain
aesthetic characteristics.628 In music, for example, we might describe, at best, two very broad lineages –
drone music and motoric repetition – which have very different implications for how minimum is
conceived.
The first lineage emphasizes sustained tone and silence, often of indeterminate duration. Monotonal and
drone works are of particular aesthetic interest for the manner in which they expose duration as essential
musical matter. In so doing, they further problematize the relation between sound and silence and the
phenomenological status each enjoys. Does sound arise from silence or from a chaotic background of
noise,629 and what might either solution imply for the manner in which sensory information coheres to
complement or complete various forms of sonic and temporal objecthood?630
626
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 60.
Ibid., 59-62.
628
Strickland, Minimalism, 4-7; 211-2.
629
Serres, Genesis, 13.
630
The conditions of temporal objecthood are examined more fully in the subsequent discussion of concretism.
627
128
Numerous philosophers – amongst them, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Kant – have affirmed silence as the
unsayable “limits to thought, rationality, even to the human imagination,” as Stuart Sim reminds us. 631
Others, such as Dauenhauer, affirm a more positive phenomenological dimension to silence, “an active
human performance…[which] involves a yielding following upon an awareness of finitude and awe.”632
Accordingly, if ordinary speech and its attendant activity maintain their momentum through an aftersilence633 by which we recollect the activity just past and anticipate that to follow, then there is also a
more profound silence of the to-be-said,634 which necessarily pre-exists any affirmatory articulation of
existence. The eclectic philosopher, Michel Serres – in concert with the aesthetic John Cage pursues
through his silent composition, 4’33”635 – asserts the opposite, that being is inextricable from noise:
[t]he background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous unending, unchanging…Noise
cannot
be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it. As soon as a phenomenon
appears, it leaves
the noise; as soon as a form looms up or pokes through, it reveals itself by veiling noise. So noise is
not a matter of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself. 636
Undifferentiated noise, sustained pitch, and silence persist in a complex relationship. Many theorists of
perception endorse views of selective auditory attention, the “process by which the perception of certain
stimuli in the environment is enhanced relative to other concurrent stimuli of lesser immediate
priority.”637 Theoretical constructs such as the auditory filter638 provide models through which it is
possible simultaneously to situate empirical research regarding the selectivity of frequency attention and
631
Sim, Manifesto for Silence, 87. Although any discussion of Wittgenstein‟s celebrated conclusion to the Tractatus
– “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2001), 89) – must remain woefully
inadequate here, we might note even on a superficial level, that silence as a liminal figure is simultaneously active
and passive: as response or orientation to the limits of logical delimitation, silence is arguably a spectral saying of
the unsaid and the unsayable.
632
Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1980), 24.
633
Ibid., 10.
634
Ibid., 20-1.
635
John Cage, 4’33” (New York: Edition Peters, 1993). Much of Cage‟s output deals with silence and desistance,
from his early String Quartet (John Cage, String Quartet in Four Parts (New York: Henmar Press, 1960), in which
the quartet becomes progressively slower and quieter in the first three movement, to 0’00” which extends the logic
of 4’33” to any number of performers for any duration (it is in other words a way of marking the silent passage of
time).
636
Serres, Genesis, 13.
637
Marty G. Waldorff, “Auditory Attention,” The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A.
Wilson and Frank. C. Keil (Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT, 1999), 50.
638
Virginia M. Richards and Gerald D. Kidd, Jr., “Audition,” The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed.
Robert A. Wilson and Frank. C. Keil (Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT, 1999), 49.
129
perception639 as well as primary sensory experience. In terms of the latter, prolonged exposure to
sustained sound or to the genuine absence of sound produces a curious and sometimes uncomfortable type
of sensory amnesia: an inner sensory limitation of the world. John Cage describes how even in an
anechoic chamber in which every external noise is eliminated, the internal sounds produced by the
functioning of the body affirm an internal soundscape.640 In his characteristically modular prose, Samuel
Beckett, similarly problematizes the tension between the phenomenality of sound itself, and our
incorporation and dulling of the phenomenon by our sensory experience: in “this stillest night,” we persist
by “listening trying listening...for no such thing as a sound.”641 Conversely, drone music frequently
dominates our perception to the extent that extraneous information is either missed or masked. 642 The
inward world which is affirmed is that of the sonic object, of the tone itself in its persistent indifference to
an environment which on another level appears to contain it.
That this difficult relationship of drone music to silence finds diverse expressions is not surprising.
Composition drawing extensively on either might be epic or miniature, of indeterminate duration or
rigorously controlled. Yves Klein‟s Monotone Symphony – Silence (Track 10),643 which was regularly
used by Klein to accompany his performance and action painting, and which is arguably the first
minimalist drone work,644 consists of a single chord645 held for an indefinite period, followed by an
extended period of silence.646 By returning to the fundamental possibilities of music itself, this “two-part
continuum of sound and silence”647 demonstrates through the confluence of duration and tonal presence
or absence, the very quantitative basis of a musical ontology.
The inextricability of noise and silence is only problematically reduced to a type of binarism, however. 648
If proto-minimalists such as Klein, John Cage or Morton Feldman pay equal attention to sustained tone as
639
Ibid., 48.
John Cage, Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight, 1989), 228-9. Hereafter CG.
641
Beckett, “Still 3,” CSP, 270.
642
The phenomenon of masking is discussed by Richards and Kidd, “Audition,” 48.
643
Yves Klein, Monotone Symphony, 1949, 20 November 2011 <http://www.artep.net/kam/symphony.html>.
644
Strickland, Minimalism, 124.
645
As Strickland suggests, the work is more accurately described as monochordal than monotonal (ibid., 35).
646
For example, the performance which accompanied the first of Klein‟s celebrated Anthropométries of the Blue
Epoch (Yves Klein, Anthropométries of the Blue Epoch, 1960) – action painting where naked models, painted in
Klein‟s signature colour, International Klein Blue (IKB), would imprint their bodies on canvases mounted on gallery
walls – consisted of a sustained chord of twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of silence (Hannah
Weitemeier, Yves Klein (Köln: Taschen, 2001), 55).
647
Ibid., 11.
648
Another problem might be the connection between drone and repetition, and the former as an exponential case of
the latter, although Strickland correctly criticizes the tenuous basis of this argument (Strickland, Minimalism, 145).
640
130
to its alternation with silence, the music of La Monte Young and those that follow in his path, exposes the
possibility that sustained tone can itself be interpreted as silent. Exemplary among such works is Young‟s
first epic drone composition, The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys,649 a composition which, in
principle, is still ongoing.650 In its many incarnations by Young‟s Theatre of Eternal Music,651 various
sustained tones are held above an amplified drone which was initially produced by the motor of his pet
turtle‟s aquarium, but subsequently replaced by synthesized sound. Young set up these drones to sound
for some time prior and subsequent to any performance of the work, intensifying their representational
element as a “primordial sonic vibration,”652 an ethereal continuum from which sonic being arises. In
several ways, The Tortoise maintains Young‟s link to aesthetic indeterminacy:653 the precise duration of
Young‟s drone environment is unspecified, running from a few hours to several days;654 with the
exception of the drone, instrumentation and accompanying pitch are not set out by the composition itself,
determined only in relation to each performance.
Yet, for all this, the dominant characteristic of this music is the persistence655 of its invariance, a distinctly
difficult, but nonetheless necessary determinacy.656 It is precisely to the extent that the work seems static
that it reveals within its constituent, sustained pitches a sonic world in considerable flux. Young‟s drones
are intended to explore the tension at the heart of sustained sound. Exposing that these sounds are
themselves complex singularities containing a series of overtones which are intensified in relation to the
sounding of other prolonged pitches, allows Young to reveal the possibility of a musical materialism
which presents together the properly quantitative aspect of duration and the qualitative feature of timbre.
It is important to stress, however, that in terms of our sensory encounter, the complexity of the latter
essentially rests on the prolongation of the former. For a listener to be fully aware of the timbrel subtleties
of drone music, it is essential that their exposure to the sustained tone is of sufficient duration.657
649
La Monte Young, The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, 1964-present.
Ibid., 157; Schwartz, Minimalists, 39.
651
This is the name Young and Marianne Zazeela chose for the group responsible for performing these works,
subsequent to his affiliation with the Fluxus group of artists and his first drone compositions, amongst them,
Composition 1960 # 7, which directs performers to hold an open fifth for an indefinite period (ibid., 38; Strickland,
Minimalism, 139-40; 145).
652
Ibid., 157.
653
There are as many distinctions between the work of Young and Cage as there are similarities. As Strickland
notes, “[w]hereas Cage‟s aesthetic embraced a theoretical infinity of sounds as music, Young gravitated again and
again to a specific and singular sound-event, on which he focused normally by means of extended duration” (ibid.,
144), echoing the sentiment of Nyman (Nyman, Experimental Music, 119) and Mertens (Mertens, American, 25).
654
Nyman, Experimental Music, 121.
655
Potter calls attention to the adoption of the term sustenance in relation to Young‟s drone work (Potter, Four, 22).
656
Nyman, Experimental Music, 122.
657
Ibid.
650
131
It is also true that performed at high enough volumes, the persistence of drones masks extraneous
information, and thus paradoxically is proximate to silence to the extent that it constitutes a ground – a
point of strange, inertial stasis658 – which acts simultaneously to re-expose not only the possibility, but
also the immanence, of movement and change. We might say that the apparently original function of both
silence and noise are easily displaced into one another, and thus that drone music produces a particular
noisy silence, responses to which invariably range from perturbation to approbation, from interest to
obliviousness. As Rasch reminds us, because noise is destructive from the perspective of those trying to
distinguish a specific message from within its generative multiplicity, but is simultaneously the ground
from which genuine autonomy might be produced in the first instance, it must “be seen as inherently
ambiguous, neither desirable nor undesirable in and of itself.”659
d) Autotelism
Yet, if duration and tonal presence or absence are central to quantifying musical being, they leave only
partly unveiled the processual aspect of composition and performance.660 In particular, Robert Fink
identifies this second lineage of musical minimalism as pulse-pattern minimalism, emphasizing his
concern with “minimalism as repetition, particularly as repetition with a regular pulse, a pulse that
underpins the complex evolution of musical patterns to alter listener perception of time and telos in
systematic, culturally influential ways.”661 That repetition and process are elements fundamental to most
music is not in dispute.662 They serve as mnemonic devices which provide cohesion at the level both of
content and of structure, and in this process steer our perceptual directedness, our temporal as well as
spatial situatedness (as Fink suggests). “Repetition in the traditional work appears as a reference to what
658
Schwartz remarks that stasis is the “single word [that] summed up all of Young‟s musical interests,” describing
how his celebrated string Trio discards melody and pulse in order to expose immobility and temporal suspension as
its principal musical ends (Schwartz, Minimalists, 23).
659
William Rasch, “Injecting Noise into the System: Hermeneutics and the Necessity of Misunderstanding,”
SubStance 67 (1992): 66.
660
Nyman notes that in Young‟s music “one is able to hear what is happening while it is happening (even if one is
not aware of why it is happening)” (Nyman, Experimental Music, 123). This type of audible process is easily
differentiated from that clarified by later minimalism (particularly in the music of Reich and Glass), since it remains
essentially bound to the persistence of sounds themselves or their relation, as opposed to the rhythmical, repetitive
modes of minimalist expression.
661
Fink, Repeating, 20.
662
Ibid., 5. Mertens, American, 13-7. For the present, I bracket the considerable philosophical implications of
repetition, focusing on its role in the communication of the fundamental music material of pitch, of pitches in
combination (melody) and their durational aspect, or rhythms.
132
has gone before, so that one has to remember what was forgotten,”663 in Mertens‟ provocative formulation
of a teleological imperative: for a sense of direction and purpose to exist, the recollection of the past must
imply the future.
However, this should not distract us from the quantitative significance of minimalism‟s emphasis on
process and repetition. If minimalist repetition provides a sense of motoric movement, often even forward
propulsion, it is not a motion which is easily associated with a purpose, be this the stable and predictable
build-up and release of harmonic tension, or an end arrived at through music‟s representative or
associative aspects. Minimalism problematizes the notion of telos or purpose. Bertrand Russell – almost
certainly taking into equal account potential scientific, mathematical, philosophical and political
trajectories – reminds us that the teleological and the causal must be kept discrete, and that the type of
knowledge these produces is distinct:
When we ask „why?‟ concerning an event, we may mean either of two things. We may mean: „What
purpose did this event serve‟ or we may mean „What earlier circumstances caused this event?‟ The answer
to the former question is a teleological explanation, or an explanation by final causes; the answer to the
latter question is a mechanistic explanation…[E]xperience has shown that the mechanistic question leads to
scientific knowledge, while the teleological question does not.664
Cursorily, it is worth mentioning that much contemporary thought on teleological operation – particularly
that derived from General Systems Theory with its emphasis on dynamic teleological models involving
multifinality, equifinality, circular causality, autopoiesis and so forth665 – poses significant problems for a
reductive account such as Russell‟s above. We might add to these, from an entirely different perspective,
the work of hermeneuts such as Gadamer, who argues that the notion of truth cannot be separated by
science from the questions posed by art. This is not to suggest that a wholesale elision of either field into
the other is possible, nor is it essential to insist that the relation of minimalism to a quantitative ontology
has a necessary bearing upon the posing of teleological or mechanistic questions in themselves; it clarifies
each in turn, without collapsing them into one another. For the sake of brevity we might distinguish
between music as part of a representational teleology, which is purposive in relation to external elements,
and music as an autotelic phenomenon, in which case it is purposive in terms of the internal relations of
its constituent parts.
663
Ibid., 17.
Russell, History, 73.
665
Ludwig von Bartelanffy, General Systems Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 16-7; 77-9.
664
133
That we experience within music a sense of beginning and ending, and, between these, various types of
tension and release, hinges on the understanding that what we term music emerges through a number of
relations. In many cases such relations are essentially representational – of its programmatic and narrative
references;666 of the nexus between composer, composition, performer and listener; of the process of
music itself and the relation of part to whole, of instant to temporality. It is an immanent relation to
sound, whether in its perception or production, which renders music essentially teleological or purposive.
Accepting firstly that telos marks in music an overall sense of purposiveness – that the music is going
somewhere in particular,667 which “gives the listener a non-ambivalent orientation and that attempts to
inform him of meaningful musical contents”668 – it becomes possible to trace the differences between
what Fink terms a classical (relational) teleology and recombinatory (autotelic) teleologies. Classical
teleology, he argues, rests on two basic assumptions: an anthropic principle, according to which the
purposiveness of music “maintains a basic phenomenological congruence”669 with the human experience
of tension and release;670 and a formal principle which asserts that “the complex arc of [tension and
release…] coincides exactly with the shape of the piece…[U]timately telos determines form.”671 Many
critics, Wim Mertens amongst them, remain adamant that minimalism essentially abandons teleology, 672
invoking a “non-directed evolution in which the listener is no longer submitted to the constraint of
following the musical evolution.” Not being compelled to follow a specific chain of significances, we are
free to experience minimalist composition for what it is: generative process qua generative process.
While Fink might not dispute this last point, he quite correctly doubts the view of teleology espoused by
Mertens. In its place he proposes that minimalism exemplifies a recombinant teleology: “there is in fact
no nonteleological experience of music in Western culture, only new recombinations of teleology not yet
666
Strickland, Minimalism, 213.
Fink, Repeating, 31.
668
Mertens, American, 17. Arguing in a mould informed by Hegelian dialectics and Marxist materialism, Mertens
conflates telos with synthesis, suggesting that in teleological music the traditional conception of composition is able
thus to combine “rhythm, melody, harmony, and so on in a causal, pre-figured way” (ibid., 16-7).
669
Fink, Repeating, 44.
670
Fink draws particularly heavily on the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and pleasure and their economic
elaboration in this regard.
671
Ibid., 45. This is most conspicuous in sonata-form, where the careful exposition, development, alternation and
recapitulation of several themes present a mutually reflective productivity between content and form.
672
According to Fink, this is predicated on Mertens‟ and Nyman‟s acceptance of minimalism‟s indebtedness to the
experimental aesthetics of John Cage which necessarily means that it similarly is dependent on a rejection of
teleology and purpose (ibid., 33-4; 36-7; 40). However, Cage‟s position is not as unambiguous as this might suggest,
since Cage in fact endorses something far closer to multifinality: “[t]he answers have the questions in common”
(CG, 215).
667
134
recognized as transformations of goal-directedness.”673 Although Fink almost immediately retracts this
strong hypothesis of recombinant teleology, what is significant in this proposition is that purposiveness is
perfectly plausible both in concept and experience from outside of either the metaphysical or formalist
paradigms through which artistic production might be understood.
Fink‟s recombinant teleology must be understood as an attempt to account for the inner-purposiveness of
minimalist music in its indifference to anthropomorphic scale674 and formalist protocols.675 If it subverts
the extensive parameters, patterns and progressions which conventionally dictate movement in western art
music, minimalism is not devoid of direction as such. It is conceivable that the timbrel subtleties of a
single tone might indicate an inherent tendency towards other pitches, and hence to relationship. Equally,
although a sequence of pitches might present only fragmentary testimony to existing teleological
structures – principally, diatonic harmony and the melodic repetition and isorhythms (repeated rhythmic
patterns) which habitually attend it – the assumption that such sequences cannot in themselves capture
and orient attention speaks more of a limited understanding of structure than of any intrinsic property of
music or sound.676 Pulse and rhythm, suspension and resolution, progression and cadence: these are all
perfectly conceivable within minimal, modular, fragmentary or processual music.
Music might legitimately be described as autotelic (self-directed and intrinsically purposive) when its
self-referential capacity is simultaneously autopoietic (self-productive). To state the case otherwise: the
fact that certain sounds follow other sounds is due to their internal properties and the relations these
establish; simultaneously, for these sounds to be such as they are, these relations and the directions they
imply must be seen as necessary; we are faced with the choice, either this necessity pre-exists as a
structural demand, in which case we reinvest ourselves within in a teleological metaphysics, or the
necessity is in fact produced within the sound itself as the potential for relation, in which case it is
autotelic.
673
Fink, Repeating, 43.
The “time-frames listeners can recognize” (ibid., 44-5).
675
“Detach teleology from form, and an entire panoply of new arrangements opens up” (ibid., 46).
676
Ibid., 86.
674
135
e) Modular process as sonic quantity
Although the autotelic marks both lineages of minimalism identified here, it is considerably more
prominent in minimal forms which draw their substance from process, repetition and pulse, than in drone
works. Such minimalism in itself contains purposiveness sufficient to render external reference or relation
non-essential. The first radically minimalist use of repetition as a structuring and autopoietic technique
might be traced to Erik Satie‟s Vexations (Track 11),677 a composition which instructs the performer to
repeat its spartan fifty-two beat material eight hundred and forty times without variation, a performance
which lasts approximately eighteen hours.678 As suggested above, it is no great stretch to accept that
repetition should be essential to coherence and structure in music and, indeed, art in general. However,
that repetition should be capable of deconstituting conventional teleology, effecting a significant formal
and associative amnesia, while simultaneously substituting for this loss a new type of tensional
arrangement, is what makes its employment in minimalism remarkable.
Variously taken up in the logic of serialism,679 of which Anton Webern‟s condensed miniatures are
exemplary,680 the aleatory music of John Cage, and the work of eclectic composers such as Karlheinz
Stockhausen, such repetition is pursued with particular clarity and force in pulse-pattern minimalism, to
recall Fink‟s term. In particular, we might consider Philip Glass‟ Two Pages (Track 12),681 although a
similar emphasis on modularity and process is evident in other early minimalist works, Terry Riley‟s
jubilant early masterpiece, In C (Track 13),682 as well as Steve Reich‟s work Piano Phase683 amongst
them. Glass‟ composition takes its name from the fact that its constituent modules were originally scored
on two manuscript pages. This work is paradigmatic of both the composer‟s early and most formally
severe output, as well as that brand of minimalism which hinges on the exposition of systematic and often
audible processes. The performance score for Two Pages specifies neither instrumentation nor dynamics,
although the Electra Nonesuch recording features piano and electric organ in unison.684
677
Erik Satie, Vexations, 1893-5.
Nyman, Experimental Music, 32; Strickland, Minimalism, 125; Schwartz, Minimalists, 10.
679
Early serialism involved the arrangement the twelve pitches of the standard chromatic scale into a specific series
which, repeated throughout the composition, constituted the basic melodic material of the music. In its later and
more austere and severe forms, not only was melodic material serially organized, but also rhythm, dynamics,
orchestration and timbre.
680
In terms of repetition within serial structures, Strickland highlights Webern‟s Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30
(Strickland, Minimalism, 126).
681
Philip Glass, Two Pages, 1969.
682
Terry Riley, In C. CBS, 1968.
683
Steve Reich, Piano Phase, 1967.
684
Ibid.
678
136
Its principal structural feature is the use of additive and subtractive modules. In the case of additive
modules, a sequence, consisting of a number of pitches in a specific order,685 is repeated a number of
times before being supplemented, either by a single pitch686 or by an additional series of pitches,687 which
would then be repeated. For the compositional process to be transparent, such an additional series of
pitches will normally be a variation on the first. These supplementary series can themselves be either
additive – in which case they would present notes in addition to the original series 688 – or subtractive – in
which case they would present fewer notes than the original series.689 Such variation might equally be
properly subtractive, in which case the sequence itself would contract.690 It is partly because complex
instrumentation does not distract from this exacting structural systematicity that the compositional
process is rendered maximally audible.
Similar techniques are observable in minimalist literature and minimalist visual arts. In the case of the
former, we might consider Samuel Beckett‟s “Company.” Here the modular phrase “To one on his back
in the dark”691 undergoes various permutations in effecting within the overburdening density and inertia
of the closed space within which Beckett sets this novel a minimal sense of agency and movement.
Against the borders of self-consciousness, the boundaries of sensory and conceptual verification, and the
existential limitation of the body within actual space, the narrator (Voice) struggles against the darkness
of fading memory in order to guarantee the darkness (unknowability) of future contingency: “figments of
the imagination whose function is aesthetic play,”692 affirming the struggle of creation itself. The additive
transformation of the initial module is systematically balanced out by a recursion to the original formula.
Thus, the unstable relation between agent and agency which is brought to a climax in the query, “Can the
crawling creator crawling in the same create dark as creature create while crawling?”, is symmetrically
predicated upon contrasting expansions of motionless darkness of the initial module. The imagination is
685
As a hypothetical example, we might take the sequence of notes, C-D-E-F.
For example, C-D-E-F-G, where G is clearly a single note supplement.
687
For example, C-D-E-F-C-D-E-F-G, where the italicized C-D-E-F-G is the supplement.
688
Using the example above, C-D-E-F-C-D-E-F-G, where G is added to the sequence C-D-E-F in order to constitute
the sequences which supplements the original.
689
The subtractive version of what is still an additive sequence (in the sense that a sequence is still being added to
the original) would be C-D-E-F-C-D-E, where F has been subtracted from the original sequence in order to
constitute the sequence which supplements the original.
690
The repetition of C-D-E-F would be followed by C-D-E, and so forth. This should be distinguished from
subtraction which still takes place in an added sequence, since the processual logic remains additive in such cases, as
is predominantly the case in Glass‟ Two Pages.
691
Beckett, “Company,” 3. With this phrase Beckett begins the second line of the text.
692
C. J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 2006), 107.
686
137
stirred to genuine poiesis – “visions in the dark of light,”693 and “the conjuring of something out of
nothing”694 – which is clearly additive. This is almost immediately undercut, however – “Crawls and falls.
Lies. Lies in the dark with closed eyes resting from his crawl”695 – and the piece comes to rest as it began
“in the dark…Alone.”696
Although far less formally rigorous than the examples set by musical modularism, Beckett‟s structural
concerns are certainly comparable to those of phase-pattern minimalism. A still closer homology might be
discovered in Robert Lax‟s poem, “word,”697 a minimalist miniature which presents a four-line stanza
flanked by three, three-line stanzas, two at the start and one at the end, the first and the last being
identical:
word
word
word
a word
a word
a word
one word
two words
one word
two words
word
word
word698
The first stanza – “word/ word/ word” – presents the initial module of the work. Here is echoed the
concern which Derrida famously identifies in terms of the triplicate logic of identity – “There was
immediately a double origin plus its repetition.”699 Admittedly, Derrida‟s logic speaks not merely of the
manifest, but of the very possibility of identity. Nonetheless, Lax seems also to be asking the question,
693
Beckett, “Company,” 44.
Ibid., 39.
695
Ibid., 40.
696
Ibid.
697
Though the poem is untitled, I name it here by its first word/line.
698
Robert Lax, “word,” New Poems (London: Coracle, 1986), 9.
699
Jacques Derrida, “Ellipsis,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 2001),
378.
694
138
how many times must a thing be repeated for this repetition contingently to stabilize the void at the heart
of identity? The answer appears to be three: the first repetition marks the split and incommensurability
between the lost unity of an idea and its presentation; the second repetition doubles the split, re-presents
it, in order to stabilize presentation itself. Badiou would suggest that this repetition, or metastructure, is
the minimal necessity for the presentation of any situation whatsoever.700 Word is clearly self-referential –
it is the word “word,” and it traces, performs and encircles the performance of its content. Its reference is
also external to the other repetitions of the module “word” in the stanza, as well as a more general law of
consecution which underpins the traditional order of language: that one word will follow another word.
These concretize – indeed, quantify – the minimal conditions in which poietic force and poetic
presentation are able to coincide.
By adding the indefinite article, a, the second stanza defines an expansionary supplement to the first: “a
word/ a word/ a word.” This increment further concretizes and predicates what in a sense remains ideal in
the first stanza – “word,” hovering between the substantial and insubstantial, becomes “a word.”
Simultaneously this predication is a subtraction, however, for there is a definite quality, or arguably a
certain purity which is retained in the idea, which is sacrificed through the addition of the indefinite
article. “[A] word” hovers between the idea – the idea of identity and the reflexivity of the idea itself –
and the definite; between “word” and the word. Lax resolves the problem in a remarkable and, indeed,
minimal manoeuvre, by shifting to the numerical realm of specific quantity. The third stanza presents a
more complex variation, the alternative “one word/ two words/ one word/ two words,” which is again
both additive and subtractive in relation to the initial module, “word”. It is additive, first, in several
obvious senses: the addition of the plural (“words”); the fact that these lines posit additional variations on
the initial module; the internal variance of the stanza (the alternation of “one word” and “two words”) is
itself a type of addition; and most significantly, the alternating lines also present rudimentary counting
and addition, “one…two.” These lines also add definition: the indefinite article “a” becomes alternately
“one” and “two.” Interestingly, such definition is also subtractive in a significant sense, since specificity
is shown here to be subtracted from non-specificity.
Interpreting word as a concrete poem701 – one in which the form and content of the poem reflect one
another, the flow of language obeying its own meaningful prescription – we encounter the full sense in
which this third stanza must be understood as deeply ambiguous. “[O]ne word” clearly is self700
BE, 93-4.
It is possible to identify at least three types of concrete poetry: visual, sound and verbal. This last is well
exemplified in the present example of Lax‟s poetry.
701
139
contradictory from the perspective of concrete reflexivity: it subtracts from its substantial, self-referential
independence, since “one word” is, of course, not one word, but two words. In this subtraction, however,
it refers back to “a word” of the second stanza, which, in turn, is a “word,” indeed the “word” of the first
stanza: a single word struggling for its conceptual and concrete singularity. So, in a sense, the developed
module “one word” subtracts from itself only to add quantitatively to the original module, while also
affirming the intrinsic concrete value of “word.” The alternate line of the third stanza, “two words,”
presents itself without such contradiction. Clearly, it is adding “a word” to the initial module, “word,” and
so is “two words,” a self-reflexive, affirmative performance. Simultaneously it makes oblique reference to
the two words of its alternating partner – “one word” – by providing an external point of reference for the
latter. In returning to a repetition of the opening module and stanza – “word/ word/ word” – the poem
seeks to affirm the quantitative, cumulative, modular, and repetitive character of materialization, and,
more specifically, materialization through language. Having begun with a self-referential idea, and
proceeded through its indefinite and then numerical quantification, we are closer to recognizing in the
final stanza three singular and discrete words. Lax, through an exemplary, modular minimalism, points us
precisely towards the conditions of internal and external reference which approximate the quantitative
conditions of being.
In the visual arts, a parallel emphasis on serial and modular expansion is evident in Sol le Wit‟s sculpture
with its exposition of the modular logic of geometric structure. In HRZL 1, (Figure 51)702 a work
composed of concrete cubes, we discover “ the realization of a numeric and geometric sequence of
incremental units,” which, much like some of the open-ended additive techniques of Philip Glass, could
“extend out indefinitely” in exposing the “variations available within an original premise…[and] within
the basic cube and square form.”703 The work simultaneously pulls the viewer inward, along the central
axis upon which it is aligned,704 and upward, along the diagonal line of its progressive levels. It transects
space in a manner which is at once so systematic, impersonal and pervasive that it “set[s] art and reality
on the same plane...[T]he selection of a regulated scheme…[reveals] works that self-referentially stand
for what they are without illusionistic deception.”705 In the space shared between perceiver and work, the
constituent cubes of HRZL 1, even more blatant in a sculpture such as 1 2 3 4 5 5 6 (Figure 52),706 cannot
702
Sol LeWitt, HRZL 1, 1990. Private collection, Italy.
Marzona, Minimal Art, 68.
704
Ibid.
705
Anne Rorimer, “Approaches to Servility: Sol LeWitt and his Contemporaries,” Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, ed.
Gary Garrels (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2000), 70
706
Sol Le Witt, 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1978. Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond.
703
140
help but recall the architectural, the “the geometry of the city.707” Yet, this should not detract from the fact
that, in its modular expansion, the work exemplifies the autotelic thrust of minimalism in its
geometrically quantifiable aspect.
Figures 51: Sol LeWitt, HRZL, 1990
Figure 52: Sol Le Witt, 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1978.
Of Glass‟ use of additive and subtractive modular repetition, Keith Potter writes the following:
Each work is constructed from a Basic Unit…The scores simply notate the expansions and
contractions of the Basic Unit that forms the structure of each work. They do this, though, by
grouping sub-units and their expansions or contractions into figures of varying lengths…Two Pages
represents Glass‟s first use of rigorous additive process in a composed-out score.708
707
Martin Friedman, “Construction Sights,” Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, ed. Gary Garrels (New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 2000), 55.
708
Potter, Four, 287-8.
141
It is somewhat unexpected that despite the composition‟s formal simplicity, despite its being little more
than a “study in the elongation and subsequent contraction of a simple musical line,”709 it retains a certain
complexity. A possible explanation might be found in considering the manner in which more complex art
habitually conceals its own artificiality. To be maximally effective it presents its constitutive complexities
as essential. There is no strain in affirming the realism and mimetic precision of Don Eddy‟s Private
Parking V (Figure 52).710
Figure 53: Don Eddy, Private Parking V, 1971.
We are struck not by the virtuosity of the brush strokes that must accompany such a painting, but rather
by the sheer fact that, were the context of our perception even slightly different, we might easily mistake
the work for a photograph. Such technical complexities, with the possible exception of formal
composition, easily could pass us by entirely by the very force with which such complexity coheres
within a single work.
709
710
Tim Page, liner notes, Philip Glass, Early Works. Elektra Nonesuch, 1994.
Don Eddy, Private Parking V, 1971. Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City.
142
Similarly, Virginia Woolf‟s short story, “The Mark on the Wall,”711 presents, through a complex diction,
syntax and structure of relations, the manner in which the curvatures of thought are habitually related to
singular, phenomenal points – in this case, a mark on the wall of a room in which the narrator is seated.
This realization serves not to dematerialize such physical points into the complexity of the linguistic, but
rather affirms the integrity of matter obliquely within the complex of perception and perspective which
language negotiates.
We encounter the mark from several perspectives: first, as the minimal differentiation of substance within
undifferentiated sensory experience, the “small round mark”712 of novelty, upon which attention and
thought readily “swarm;”713 second, as a hole made by a nail, an intrusion into the integrity of the unified
surface of reality (the wall), but also a functional absence which supports the possibility of represented
phenomena (the “miniature” painting714); third, the mark as the possibility of something radically exterior
to thought and perception, of “some round black substance”715 which draws us back from “the inaccuracy
of thought”716 to the world of matter; fourth, “[i]n certain lights the mark on the wall seems actually to
project from the wall…I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow,”717 suggesting the
manner in which reality takes shape through the unsure but effective orientation of perception and
thought, in sensory information ionised towards the polarity of material consequences.
By tracing these complexities of thought through the subtleties of experience to which this self-conscious
and subtly metafictional718 narrative alludes, Woolf affirms the comparability of the fictive and the Real:
“[h]ow shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things…were not entirely
real.”719 The narrative faithfully reproduces the complexity of the process through which the real,
perception, and thought become entwined. Implicitly, it enacts a local version of Husserl‟s universal
711
Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, ed. David Bradshaw
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001).
712
Ibid., 3.
713
Ibid.
714
Ibid.
715
Ibid., 5.
716
Ibid., 4.
717
Ibid., 7.
718
“But how dull this is, this historical reflection! It doesn‟t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant
track of thought,” the narrator remarks, with a degree of self-consciousness arguably sufficient to suggest that in the
figure of the narrator, memory, language and intention combine with sufficient force actively to script, rather than
merely transcribe, reality (ibid., 5).
719
Ibid., 6.
143
phenomenological epochē, or a “method of parenthesizing”720 which aims to establish the independence
of the realm of empirical consciousness from the external world of spatial and temporal conditions. The
real – here the mark on the wall – re-emerges only when we bracket our insistence on the existential
aspect of its being: “[w]e put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the
natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being: thus
the whole natural world which is continually „there for us‟.”721 In order to apprehend the noema or
perceptual content of the mark on the wall with greater clarity, the narrator – and, to the extent that the
imagination is able to reproduce this mark, also the reader – must apply a local epochē which enables the
discernment of specific perceptual information from within an immensely complex situation. It becomes
possible to weigh various perspectives, and to identify an object which corresponds to accurate
observation. It is such a local exercise which, from a phenomenological perspective,722 allows us to
follow the experimentation with the limits of phenomenal experience explicit in the narrative itself, while
still speculating as individual interpreters on the nature of Woolf‟s mark. The present argument diverges
fundamentally in this respect: although the reader follows these paths with the narrator, ultimately we do
not recreate this full complexity in itself, but only its appearance. This appearance, which might easily be
taken for genuine equivalence, reveals the forces which may be regarded as specific to representational
literature, which seems to bind an excess of data through a medium that, despite the odds, we are capable
of processing as a contingent whole.
This is not to suggest that complexity clarifies. Nor should we underestimate that within an “environment
[which] is always already more complex than any and all systems and the observations and operations
they carry out”723 we might be tempted to explain the totality of aesthetic effect by “the quintessentially
modernist and Enlightenment strategy…of reducing complexity via social consensus.”724 With the notable
exception of those who come to a work with a specialized critical agenda in mind, we habitually
encounter in most representational and teleological art an enjoinder to the hermeneutic task of first
affirming the work as a totality in effect, before proceeding to a structured delineation of its constituent
parts, references or meaning. Such propositions, in combining the normative functions of taste and
720
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First
Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 60.
721
Ibid., 61.
722
Although the present understanding of the Real is almost entirely at odds with the phenomenological insistence
on the primacy of consciousness and the intentionality of perception, it nonetheless provides an apposite qualitative
counterpoint to the claim of quantitative ontology I sketch in relation to minimalism in the present work.
723
William Rasch and Cary Wolfe, Introduction, Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), 22.
724
Ibid.
144
teleological judgment, potentially miss what is formalism‟s most obvious gain: that otherwise chaotic
sensibility is unified not by reducing its complexity, but by rendering such complexity perceptible without
having aesthetically to recreate the detailed processes of formation. Such works conceal that form itself is
subject to formation, or that structure is subject to structuration.
Minimalism by contrast – even in its monotonal, monochromatic, and most concrete literary
manifestations, all of which emphasize immanence and presence – draws attention to the processual
elements of both form and structure. Minimalism presents not only minimal material, but also minimal
impediment to the generative or poietic process itself. The sheer immanence of this process, the quantity
of information it presents as immediate, has the potential to overwhelm, appearing thus more complex
than in the case of its referential aesthetic counterparts.
The significance of the broadly-speaking formalist analyses of Two Pages undertaken by Wes York725
and Potter726 becomes clearer when we consider that their meticulous deciphering does not reflect solely
on the structure and effects of the music. Recalling the argument above regarding the autotelic character
of pulse-pattern minimalism, the modular repetition and variation in Two Pages paradoxically draws
attention to the manner in which musical change and progression occur, both from the perspective of form
and from that of the perceiver. As such, minimalism represents nothing other than the process of
production itself, and it is this poiesis to which formalist analyses obliquely attest. In Potter‟s analysis, the
one hundred and seven constituent modules727 are grouped in four parts. Each part presents a different
exploration of additive and subtractive procedures, mostly through permutation of a basic sequence, G-CD-Eb-F. The first involves what is described above as a subtractive supplement, in which what is added is
a contracting restatement of the original material; the second is properly additive, and involves the
symmetrical expansion and contraction of a sub-unit; the third involves a “still more complex additive
structure” involving the addition of a second figure; the fourth involves additive repetition once again, but
having abandoned the grounding pitch, G, shifts the referential ground of the listener. The effect –
irrespective of towards which tone in the various relentless repeated sections the listener‟s attention might
be directed, with the resultant variations in tonal gravity such differences solidify – is one of evolving
displacement.
725
Wes York, “Form and Process,” Writings on Glass, ed. Richard Kostelanetz and Robert Fleming (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: U of California P, 1997), 60-79.
726
Potter, Four, 289-92.
727
Schwartz, Minimalists, 120.
145
In the case of modular minimalism, a tension persists between asymmetry and rigorous mathematical
order which stresses the already emphatic connection between repetition, additive and subtractive
modularization, number, and a quantitative ontology. The transparency of these quantitative processes
helps only to regionalize a certain aesthetic dislocation, a generative atopia. In particular, musical
minimalism – even as it engages and interacts, retaining not only conceptual but often expressive links
between composer, work, performer and audience – demonstrates itself as simultaneously self-reflexive,
self-productive, self-structuring and self-sustaining. It is thus that minimalism is both committed and
indifferent, and in this paradox it draws attention to the point at which what is normally taken as the
qualitative realm of musical form and content, reveals its quantitative substrate. Minimalism‟s first
lineage – the drone composition, the monochromatic canvas, the most austere and descriptive prose –
indicates quantity through duration and sonic immanence, invariance of surface, the interplay of
sustenance and silence, presence and absence. Modular minimalism – phase-pattern music, serial
sculpture, the modular approach of much concrete poetry – exposing its autotelic bias, draws out the
quantitative ontology of accumulation, series and counting. In both paradigms, we witness a shift from
the critically and philosophically dominant assumption that at the heart of art‟s being we finally discover
only a complex set of qualitative relationships. It is thus by the austere path of minimalism, that we
discover a back-door – the aesthetic – through which we might take a few tentative steps towards a
quantitative understanding of being.
7. THE QUALIFICATION OF QUANTITY
a) The refusal of quantity
Regardless of whether its form is transcendental, logical, existential, or phenomenological, the refutation
of the Absolute which inhabits most strains of contemporary thought is intimately bound to the refusal of
quantity. Exemplary amongst such repudiations is the opposition offered by Horkheimer and Adorno to
the manner in which the Enlightenment instrumentalizes reason by reducing thought to a correlate of
146
quantification.728 Nature, justice, economy and knowledge are unified under a supreme law of
calculability.729 Quantity comes to dominate quality.730 It is the dogmatic extension of the quantitative
claim that similarly subjugates multiplicity to unity,731 allows science to colonize, and thus mythologize,
the poietic sphere,732 and installs the anthropic subject as maker and master of the material world.733
Quantity reduces to a nodal relationship between subject and object “[t]he manifold affinities between
existing things.”734 On this basis, it becomes possible to indicate a point of confluence between an
“objectifying definition”735 that confirms the radical disconnectedness of concept and thing, grounded
solely in the illegitimate ascendency of quantity, and a division of labour between science and art.736
Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the maintenance of such oppositions is comprehensible only by
passing through the heart of dialectical identification – “each thing is what it is only by becoming what it
is not”. Just as subject and object, concept and thing, are ultimately interdependent, so too are art and
science. “Science,” they claim, “becomes aestheticism, a system of isolated signs,”737 while “art as
integral replication has pledged itself to positivist science, even in its specific techniques. It becomes
indeed, the world over again.”738
A philosophy of progressive enlightenment identifies as its transhistorical vocation the pursuit of freedom
through the systematic elimination of what is unknown. To guarantee its momentum, such a philosophy
posits close to its foundation the very chasm between intuition and concept, world and idea, which it
seeks subsequently to seal.739 For Horkheimer and Adorno, the principal problem lies not in the potential
circularity of this type of justification,740 but in the strategic error which philosophy makes in insisting
upon quantity as an absolute and immanent pre-dialectic ground for its emergence. Equation becomes the
master of the dialectic, restraining the sheer “abundance of qualities,”741 sealing the incalculable within a
728
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund
Jephcott and ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 19-20.
729
Ibid., 4.
730
Ibid., 3-6.
731
Ibid., 3-5,
732
Ibid., 7, 13, 18
733
“The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them” (ibid., 6).
734
Ibid., 7.
735
Ibid., 11.
736
Ibid., 12-3.
737
Ibid., 13.
738
Ibid.
739
Ibid.
740
“[T]hought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced so that it can
finally be replaced by the machine” (ibid., 19).
741
Ibid., 6.
147
“preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth.”742 Through asserting unity
as both origin and goal,743 philosophy fails to recognize its dialectical foundation, and passes instead into
a mathematical fundamentalism. To begin counteracting the “triumphant calamity” 744 which proceeds
from the instrumental application of such absolute quantification, we must undertake the dialectical
enlightenment of enlightenment itself.
Those situations which claim autonomy require particularly close attention, since their logic presents a
fragmentary totalization of the rift between concept and world. Prime amongst these is art which, “[a]s an
expression of totality…claims the dignity of the absolute.”745 In its poietic aspect, art becomes the
generative subject of a world; in its mimetic aspect, it faithfully traces “the world over again.”746 These
forces manifest through the distribution of sensible and cognitive information across the various species
and media of art, a situation which proves strictly nonsummative. If the unity of art “can never be restored
by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art,”747 we are yet called to postulate something
integral or convergent in its stead, for art, ultimately, has definite referents. On one hand art offers itself
as self-productive totality, but on the other, it is clear no additions of its parts can constitute the totality it
claims to generate or translate. There is a clear disjuncture between art as self-productive totality and art
as nonsummative synaesthesia which reproduces the rift which separates concept from thing. To grant
consistency either to this separation or to its bridging, we are compelled to choose between the
foundational, pre-emptive ascendency of quantity (and its concomitant suppression of quality), and
critical consciousness, which functions dialectically through a transformative processing of difference as
the essence of identity.
Quantity subjects culture and society to a mode of domination from which an incalculable enlightenment
promises liberation – an outside to the irrational state to which reason has dangerously regressed. The
inheritance of a metaphysics of “true reality”748 must be challenged by passing through the void of
identity, to a negative dialectics, which, Adorno claims, “change[s] this direction of conceptuality” – the
compulsive movement towards predicated identity – through a “turn towards non-identity.”749 It is
742
Ibid., 18.
With respect to the former, “its ideal is the system from which everything and anything flows” (ibid., 4); as
regards its destiny, “anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion” (ibid.).
744
Ibid., 1.
745
Ibid., 14.
746
Ibid., 13.
747
Ibid.
748
Ibid., 16.
749
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), 12.
743
148
possible to concur with much of the argument presented by Horkheimer and Adorno. They expose the
dark potential that inheres in situations where like and unlike are counted-as one another – the tyranny of
the One, prefiguring Badiou – and in which political, legal, ethical and economic equivalence become the
rule. Retaining a critical antagonism towards the illegitimate reign of irrationality, their analysis sketches
not a simplistic dystopia, but the possibility of a return to reason. By uncoupling thought from number,
they recognize the antagonistic dynamic at the heart of cultural production – the ideological strain
between quantity and quality – in which art emerges as a key negotiator.
It is less clear how negative dialectics is not guilty of the same failure it criticizes in mathematics 750 – the
inability to adhere to its own axiomatic self-limitation which leads it to identify itself as foundational
possibility. The negative dialectic operates by assuming the full decisional force of the axiom internally,
thus positing itself as a totality which self-reflexively and necessarily undermines its own totality. Are we
not asked merely to affirm a series of strategic inversions: decision becomes constitutive undecidability;
positive identification passes into a “consistent sense of non-identity;”751 the ruthless quantification of
reality becomes a refusal of quantity? It is finally an axiomatic decision to grant a certain authority to the
dialectic which prevents this argument from drifting into a quasi-anthropological history of equivalence, a
threnody for the sacrifices demanded by capitalist quantification. For all its strengths, the argument is
founded upon a decision regarding number: number and enumeration, quantity and quantitative
progression, constitute a “substrate of domination.”752
By contrast, I suggest that quantity is simply an ontological substrate of pure indifference. Quantity is
constitutively disinterested in quality. Is it not possible that ontological quantity passes into instrumental
quantification at the precise moment at which quantity is itself held as the primary quality of every entity?
Such a qualification of quantity ought to be counteracted faithfully by insisting on a quantitative ontology
– the quantitative persistence of what in Being is in itself.
753
While indifference and nonidentity are
retained at the rhetorical centre of Adorno‟s negative dialectics, they remain spectral and inexpressible
not of necessity, but through a refusal of quantity in itself, which is accompanied by a radical conversion
of quantity into quality. The critique of instrumentalization becomes itself instrumental, and it is not
number which betrays us to this fate, but a growing insensitivity to fluctuating intensities of quantity.
750
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 19.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5.
752
Ibid., 6.
753
Ibid.
751
149
Minimalism might be understood as the aesthetic attempt to translate such intensities without the
mediating vocabulary of qualification. This it does not through an indiscriminate assertion of quantity,
however. In almost all cases, minimalism renders with unprecedented clarity, the manner in which
particular qualities and ontological quantity are co-emergent in the work. However, it also reveals the
character of the absolute – that the work rests on the recognition of quantity qua quantity. This is not the
paranoiac fear of externality which Horkheimer and Adorno suggest arrives with “the pure immanence of
positivism,”754 and which results in the periodic claim that art can be sealed from reality. To the contrary,
what is absolute in minimalism – whether it be revealed through reflective judgement or through the
autopoietic emergence of the work – is that minimalism presents access to the Real.
b) The One and the persistence of the universal
Once we are willing to reject the Absolute and the Real, the suspension of quantity as the radix of being
and the hypostatization in its place of quality as principle of ontological fundamentalism, are all too easily
accomplished. The affirmation or negation of the world is henceforth, from the perspective of thought,
devoid of absolute quantitative value or pure number. We are given over to what Meillassoux identifies as
the dominant coordinating expression of western philosophy – the correlation of being and thought.755 In
this respect, might we not return to that cornerstone of metaphysics, Parmenides‟ Fragments, to discover
that if “the same thing is there for thinking and for being,”756 what is evoked is not the equation of thought
and being, but the recognition of the Real (in the form of the One) as an absolute precondition. At the
precise moment at which the Real is suppressed in favour of the equation of thought and being, the
destitution of a radical or absolute notion of number and quantity appears not only desirable, but a
necessity. If the quantitative and mathematical aspect of being periodically reaffirms its centrality – from
Parmenides in antiquity, to Russell in modernity– a melancholia persists in its depths; a pervasive if silent
acknowledgement that the conditions of thought through which the Absolute might legitimately be
expressed in quantitative terms are always subject to paradoxes, fluctuations and regresses.
To be clear, the preliminary recognition upon which a reclamation of the Absolute depends is the
repositing of thought as the basis for contemporary materialism, although, we ought perhaps to follow
Blackburn in terming this a radical physicalism, since “physics itself asserts that not everything that exists
754
Ibid., 11.
AF, 5.
756
Parmenides, Fragments, trans. David Gallop (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984), 57.
755
150
is material; the world includes such items as forces and fields.”757 The transumption of the Real from the
transcendental realm of pure ideas to the physical realm promises to salvage the Absolute by
demonstrating the legitimacy of the claim that entities and thought participate equally in substantiality
(materialism).758 This claim, it will be argued, must now appeal to something beside the doxa of an
exhausted dualistic metaphysics. The conspicuous diversity of responses attests to the fact that this field
remains contested. From the radical empiricism of William James‟ later monism, with its insistence that
the distinction of mind from matter is predicated on different arrangements of the same fundamental
material,759 through the eclectic materialist critique of ideology offered by Slavoj Žižek, to the Platonic
recuperation of the substantiality of thought emphasized in the work of such ontologists as Badiou and
Meillassoux,760 we discover a common orientation towards reanimating the relation between being and
ontology. In more recent work particularly, the overwhelming concern lies in discerning genuinely radical
change from within the almost overwhelming multiplicity of undifferentiated information which marks
every continuous existential situation. Moreover, it promises us the means by which to persist with such
radical change; to draw out its consequences.
It is the latter process which underpins Badiou‟s definition of the subject: in brief, the subject as the
ongoing process and ensuing effects of affirming the radical innovation that can only be heralded by a
true event, a rupture across being itself. Persistence marks the manner in which entities follow the shape
of the Real. It is the activity of the subject to trace this persistence. As Badiou notes, it is a matter of
“subjectivation and a consistency.”761 “All that is required of us is to hold to […what can be completed]
and to what cannot be completed,”762 to persist in the understanding of what is immanent to knowledge
and what is infinitely potential. Persistence – the “pure patience of the subject”763 – reveals that the
essence of hope is the manner in which the subject is able infinitely to commit itself to a situation which
is both immanent and indefinitely distant. And it is this persistence which marks what Badiou terms
fidelity.
757
Simon Blackburn, “Metaphysics” (with a section on Time by Robin Le Poidevin), The Blackwell Companion to
Philosophy, ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 65.
758
It should be noted that the term partake of is preferred by the majority of Plato‟s translators, and here should be
understood to be interchangeable with the term participate in which I have generally preferred for stylistic reasons.
759
David C. Lambeth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 75-8.
760
This is not to return to that which Meillassoux criticizes in terms of the correlation between thought and being,
but precisely to recognize the being of thought. See AF, 28; Hallward, Badiou, 51; see Brassier‟s contribution to
Speculative Realism (Collapse III), 319-21. Hereafter SRB.
761
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003),
91.
762
Alain Badiou, “Truth,” 136.
763
Badiou, Saint Paul, 98.
151
“Hope is…the subjectivity of a victorious fidelity, fidelity to fidelity, and not the representation of its future
outcome…[H]ope has nothing to do with the future. It is a figure of the present subject, who is affected in
return by the universality for which he works.” 764
But is the knot of hope, potentiality and persistence limited to subjective activity, and, if not, how might it
manifest from the perspective of entities? It is to this possibility that minimalism addresses itself. It does
this both through those entities which are produced – the objects predicated upon the persistence of
subjective activity – and those entities which exceed any such division – absolute entities or objects, in
other words. If it is possible to conceive within a single paradigm, Badiou‟s assertion that persistence in
itself (“fidelity to fidelity”) propels subjectal activity together with the claim that persistence, insofar as it
exceeds any particular contingency, names the weave of entities within the Real, this paradigm must be
one in which an object counts fully as a subject, but without being a subject. Such a situation is, finally,
an extension of the limits of existence itself.
If minimalism proves exemplary in this regard, it reveals itself, above any stylistic peculiarity, as a
significant, if oblique, meditation on the nature of ontology. What persists in the exemplary minimalist
work is nothing other than persistence itself – the persistence which traverses both subject in its relation
to incompletion (a position which will be clarified below), and entities insofar as they exist qua the Real.
In this light, the persistence of minimalism is a self-reflexive instantiation of pure persistence; and since
persistence – as in the case of Badiou‟s formulation of hope – is not referential or predicative as such, but
the innermost property of the Real, we are once again brought to the autotelic character of minimalism,
and of its ontological status. The persistence of minimalism presents the process of producing objects
without end – end, both in the sense of its being without a necessary final predicate, as well as its being
without an externally directed purpose.
The mere facticity of persistence – that an entity persists – is sufficient to produce in relation to the
persistent entity, a theory of the universal. As Badiou notes, “[t]hought becomes universal only by
addressing itself to all others.”765 Regardless of whether we take as the point of departure singularity or
multiplicity, discrete entities or undifferentiated chaos, this is precisely the force that must persist if the
One is to be universal: it must be One for all.766 Attempts to define the One advance only spasmodically,
764
Ibid., 95-7.
Ibid., 109.
766
This is “the determination of a subject-of-truth who indistinguishes the One and the „for all‟” (ibid., 108), which
Critchley refers to as Badiou‟s situated universality (Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 42). Affirming this view,
765
152
if at all. We are today no more fundamentally certain of its ontological or conceptual actuality than was
Parmenides, its first great theorist, for whom “[t]he multitude of sensible things a[re] mere illusion. The
only true being is „the One,‟ which is infinite and indivisible.”767 In the fragmentary remnant of
Parmenides‟ philosophical poem, the interrelation of modality and being is firmly established: “What
routes of inquiry alone are there for thinking:/ The one – that [it] is, and that [it] cannot not be/…The
other – that [it] is not and that [it] needs must not be.”768 The prescription is vast: within the scope of the
One lie both the cosmos and existence. Ontology without some consideration of the One – whether in
affirmation of contradiction – proves prohibitively difficult. We habitually stumble on the uneven ground
left from the effort of sealing the rift between the One in itself, and our attempts to stabilize it through
thought. We are returned to a decision, the very axiom from which Parmenides draws the force of his
poem: “the decision about these matters, depends on this:/ Is [it] or is [it] not? but it has been decided, as
is necessary/ To let go the one as unthinkable, unnameable…/but to allow the others, so that it is, and is
true.”769 “Thus [the One] must either be completely or not at all.”770
c) One and Multiple
The paradoxes which attend the exposition of this fundamental ontological axiom – that the One is, or it is
not – are nowhere elaborated with greater tenacity or insight than in Plato‟s Parmenides. By focusing on
the minute detail of dialectic method, the work relentlessly interrogates the difficulties in establishing the
essential ground of metaphysics. Being – which to be must itself be oriented towards consistency –
reveals a great deal of instability in response to our attempts to impose upon it stability, either through
thought or procedure, as form or as entity. We encounter a constant vacillation between the One and the
Multiple in attempting to think either independently, or relatively. Here we might recall that the young
Socrates of this dialogue, who, adhering to a still immature theory of forms, sets as the discursive target
nothing other than a proof that the One and Multiple are in themselves mutually implicative: “if he should
demonstrate... what one is, to be many, or conversely, the many to be one – at this I‟ll be astonished.”771
albeit from the eclectic but also mathematically informed perspective of Michel Serres, we might consider, in the
terms of Harari and Bell, that “universality and the global can only be conceived in a mode that recognizes the
predominance of regionality and the local” (Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, “Introduction: Journal àplusieurs
voies,” Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy , by Michel Serres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982), xiv).
767
Russell, History, 55.
768
Parmenides, Fragments, 55.
769
Ibid., 67.
770
Ibid., 65.
771
Plato, “Parmenides,” trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, Plato Complete Works, 129b/363.
153
This doubt rests on an assertion of form as discrete for each entity, as somehow not subject to the
inconsistencies of being. Form allows us to conceptualize the One as part of the multiple, totality of
being, and the Multiple as part of the One, but it also presents a strict injunction against the outright
confusion of these. We are barred from the One as Multiple, and from the Multiple as One.772
The difficult recognition that Parmenides requires of the young Socrates, and indeed of the reader, is that
the effective power of either form or entity, over one another or in interrelation, is finally a “power in
relation to themselves”773 – a meta-relation. The aspect of form which is itself involved in formation,
occurs not through the power of the entities that appeal to a certain form, so not by a mere metaphysical
extension of form. Rather it takes place through an essential self-relation: of form to itself, and of entities
to themselves. This is a power external to the subject of knowledge or any formal instantiation this might
take. We can, therefore, not simply rely on a transcendental authorization of being by form. The One and
the Multiple – examined both self-reflexively and in relation to one another – call our attention to the
possibility that fundamental contradiction materializes whenever the essentially quantitative aspects of
being such as totality, unity, and multiplicity are taken as the objects of ontological scrutiny.
This problem Plato addresses in Parmenides through eight central hypotheses, each of which ends in an
irresolvable paradox concerning the nature of the One, and so, too, of Being. The first hypothesis – if the
One is, it is not Many774 – exposes, through a process of negative definition, the oblique conditions for
understanding the One as absolute. Each of its eight constitutive theorems demonstrates an area of being
in which the One cannot participate: part and whole, schema or shape, location, motion and rest, like and
unlike, equal and unequal, time.775 Accepting the One as effectively barred from participatory being,
compels us to speculate as to the condition under which the One could be, and yet not participate in
existence. This ontological paradox must be understood as an extension of the first hypothesis, an
772
See Hallward, “Introduction,” 3-4.
Plato, Parmenides, 134d/369.
774
Ibid., 137c-142a/371-376. Brumbaugh‟s work is cited to provide alternate translations and coordinating
exposition and discussion of the hypotheses and theorems of Parmenides (Robert S. Brumbaugh, Plato on the One:
The Hypotheses in the Parmenides (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961), 86-90).
775
The following are the eight theorems of the first hypothesis (Plato Parmenides, 372-6; paragraph references in
parenthesis: i) the One is neither whole nor has parts, and is unlimited (137c-e); ii) the One is without schema or
shape (137e-138a); iii) The One is without location, in nothing and nowhere, neither contained nor self-contained
(138a-138b); iv) One is neither in rest nor in motion (138b-139b); v) the One cannot be the same as another thing or
itself, nor can the One be different from itself or another thing (138b-139e); vi) the One cannot be like or unlike
itself or the others (139e-140b); vii) the One cannot be equal or unequal (140b-140e); viii) the One has no share in
time and cannot be in time, and so cannot be older or younger (140e-142a). These hypotheses are discussed
systematically by Brumbaugh (Brumbaugh, Hypothesis, 55-85).
773
154
extension necessitated by the comprehensive dialectical method outlined earlier in the dialogue. 776
Philosophical rigour demands that we explore with tenacity both the positive and the negative conditions
of a proposition. Here we are asked what it might mean to exist outside of existence: if the One cannot
exist within ordinary being, then we are called to consider under what conditions it might exist as an
extraordinary being by tracing from the perspective of Being,777 those same theorems exposed in the first
hypothesis from the perspective of the One.778
Here, temporality emerges as central to the interrogation of metaphysics offered in Parmenides. The
dialectic exposition of the One confers a contractory coherency on the apprehension of time as
inconsistent within Being. Yet, if the whole of Being were pure inconsistency, existence would be
impossible. The unstable relation of the One to presence and futurity, to being and to becoming, is
stabilized only through the proposition of the supplement to the second hypothesis, the Eudoxian Cut.779
This Plato characterizes as an instant, a moment of transaction which allows us to account for continuity
in an existential situation which is marked simultaneously by disjunction and transformation. The One,
which in its Being appears to be entirely contradictory, and yet on another level perfectly operative, can
only persist if an a-temporal instant is offered as an ontological hinge of sorts. The One is in some
instants part of Being and in others not part of Being; at some instants in time and at others out of time; at
some instants stable, and at others in flux.
Hallward offers an admirable précis of Badiou‟s reconsideration of the dialectic of the Multiple and the
One:
[B]eing780 can be thought either in terms of the [M]ultiple or the [O]ne...[T]he only coherent conception of
Being as One ultimately depends on some instance of the One either as transcendental limit (a One beyond
being, or God) or as all-inclusive immanence (a cosmos or Nature)...[M]odernity and in particular modern
science have demonstrated that...the idea of a One-All is incoherent...[T]herefore if Being can be thought at
776
Plato, Parmenides, 136 a-c/370-1.
To recall, the upper-case Being is used to designate an ontological field, while the lower-case being indicates an
existential field.
778
The following are the theorems of the second hypothesis (ibid., 376-87): i) If the One is , it is part and whole, so
indicates both the oneness of being and that it is multiple and infinite (142b-145a); ii) as whole and part it both has,
and does not have, a schema or shape, a beginning middle and end (145a-b); iii) the One is both in itself, and in the
others (145b-e); iv) the One is both in motion and at rest (145e-146a); v) the One is both the same as itself and
different from itself (146b-147b); vi) the One is both like and unlike to itself (147c149d); vii) the One is both equal
and unequal to itself and to the others (149d-151e); viii) the One has an unstable but persistent relation to time, since
it is and becomes both older and younger than itself and the others, and it is and becomes neither older nor younger
than itself and the others (151e-155e). See Brumbaugh, Hypothesis, 86-145.
779
Plato, Parmenides, 155e - 157b/387-9. See Brumbaugh, Hypotheses, 146-150.
780
I have preferred upper-case lettering for several terms here for the sake of consistency.
777
155
all, it must be thought as multiple rather than One...[O]nly modern mathematics can think multiplicity
without any constituent reference to unity. Why? Because the theoretical foundations of mathematics
ensure that any unification, and consideration of something as one thing, will be thought as the result of an
operation, the operation that treats or counts something as one; by the same token, these foundations oblige
us to presume that whatever was thus counted, or unified, is itself not-[O]ne (i.e. [M]ultiple).781
In this light we come to understand that genuine novelty is not merely the product of a subtraction from
pure multiplicity. Such is the mechanics for ordinary existence. On the other hand, any systematic
proposition of novelty must at some point come to terms with the idea of an instant, a point of sudden
change. In a more contemporary expression, but one still remarkably faithful to Plato, Alain Badiou
proposes this fundamentally unstable and aleatory point as an event: “There certainly is novelty in the
event‟s upsurge, but this novelty is always evanescent.”782 The present work is invested in the event and
the instant to the extent that these account for the sudden emergence of novelty and, so, constitute the
necessary condition for the materialization and elaboration of novelty in its aesthetic register. Our
contention is that minimalism illustrates the strain between the One and the Multiple exemplified at the
heart of the emergence of Real entities. Its most significant works invariably amplify the manner in which
matter is shaped as art, the force of its aesthetic effect and of its phenomenological presence. Upon the
tense field between substance, concept and effect, minimalism recalls, through the instantiation of its
objects, the occurrence of relative novelty itself – indeterminate intermediary of the One and Multiple.
Rather, what interests us here is the mode of novelty with which the minimalist object confronts us, and
which presents the minimal field upon which objectal taking-place and persistence can be discerned – a
field which problematizes the proximity of the object to the event, and the mirage of the event within a
material world of real entities. The interposition of the instant or occurrence establishes the necessary
ontological condition upon which the claim that the One both is and is not, is not mere impossibility. The
six hypotheses which follow the proposition of the instant in Parmenides elaborate an essential ground
upon which the One both is and is not. Indeed the history of metaphysics is inscribed within this problem.
It begins with the Aristotelian view that “the most distinctive mark of substance appears to be that, while
remaining numerically one and the same, it is capable of admitting contradictory possibilities,”783 and
781
Hallward, “Introduction,” 3-4.
Bruno Bosteels and Alain Badiou, “Can Change Be Thought: A Dialogue with Alain Badiou,” Alain Badiou:
Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: State U of New York P, 2005), 253.
783
Nicholas Jolley, “Leibniz: truth, knowledge and metaphysics,” Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. IV: The
Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Rationalism, ed. G.H.R. Parkinson (London and New York: Routledge,
1993), 354.
782
156
manifests subsequently with particular force in Leibniz‟s exposition of the necessary and sufficient
conditions for existence. Briefly phrased, Leibniz insists on the following: that every entity must
necessarily exist monadically, as an entity which is intrinsically possible within a possible world; that
when such entities together comprise a possible world, they are said to be compossible; a possible world,
which “might be defined as a maximum set of compossible individuals”784 is finally incompossible with
any other possible world, which accounts for the singular existential charge which resides within the
actual world.785 Accordingly, an entity cannot be impossible in itself or incompossible with other entities
in an actual world.
Attempting to unravel the difficult ontological configuration within which the One and the Multiple are
compossible, the third and seventh hypotheses of Plato‟s Parmenides address themselves directly to the
Multiple. The third – what is not-One is Multiple – is the direct compliment to the One as it is exposed in
the first hypothesis.786 Turning to questions of appearance over pure Being in itself, Plato‟s seventh
hypothesis probes the properties of the Multiple from the perspective of identity, of what is discernibly
other to the One. Its principal insight is that if a simplistic atomic view of the world is implausible787 – if
the One is not – then the others, which are not One, must ultimately subscribe to pure multiplicity.
However, for the Multiple to appear at all, it must in some sense be held as One, and, consequently, both
are at once limited and infinite.788
In both hypotheses, the Multiple reveals Being as intimately connected to the interrogation of belonging.
Examined closely, the third hypothesis sets up the quantitative conditions under which belonging is
foundational to the shape of existence.789 Since the Multiple is other than the One, it must also consist of
parts (in relation to the whole). Yet a part is not a part of many things – not a part of itself – but a part of a
whole.790 In terms of existence, the Multiple thus makes possible the One without being One; it is
784
Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 171. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense,
trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 171-2; Norman Madarasz, Introduction,
Manifesto for Philosophy, by Alain Badiou. Trans. and Ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State U of New York P,
1999), 19-20. Hereafter MP.
785
Ibid., 171-2; G.H.R. Parkinson, “Philosophy and Logic,” Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 212-6.
786
If in the first hypothesis, One is understood as not-many (not Multiple), in the third hypothesis not-One is
equated with many (Multiple). Brumbaugh, Hypotheses, 151. See ibid., 151-158; Plato, Parmenides, 157b159b/389-90.
787
Brumbaugh, Hypotheses, 180.
788
Ibid., 180-1; Plato, Parmenides, 164b-165e/395-6.
789
BE, 44-8; Hallward, “Introduction,” 14-5; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 22, 24-5. Hereafter HS.
790
Plato, Parmenides, 157c-e/389.
157
Multiple without forcing into existence pure Multiplicity which would bring with it essential
inconsistency. Do we not discover here precisely the schema by which Alain Badiou distinguishes being
– pure multiplicity – from existence, or multiplicity which is counted-as-One?791 Also, does this not
prefigure that fundamental ontological ground of mathematical or quantitative relation and identity which
is formalized in the set theoretical terms of the Axiom of Foundation – “[t]hat in every multiple, there is
at least one element that „founds‟ this multiple, in the following sense: there is an element that has no
element in common with the initial multiple?”792
Upon this distinction, the contradictory belonging of the seventh hypothesis veers away from
impossibility and towards compossibility: the One and the Multiple both do and do not belong to the
infinite. Recalling that the hypothesis is specific in its dismissal of the atomic, we find that what counts as
One, multiple existence which nonetheless appears contingently unified, is apparently opposed to the pure
Multiplicity of being qua being. However, what is arguably most significant here is that neither the One
nor the Multiple exhausts the other. A model of compossibility emerges within the dynamic of this
hypothesis: existence involves the appearance of entities within a specific world; entities – which are
numerous and Multiple – are somehow counted as One. Being and existence, ontology and appearance,
are actually predicated on the pre-existence of pure multiplicity as the fabric of the Real.
Between positing the existence of the One in all things793 – the fourth hypothesis – and the affirmation in
the seventh that for entities to arise or to appear in existence, the Multiple (when the One is not, or when
the not-One is) must be counted as One, Plato examines more fully the properly negative aspects of the
One. Demonstrating that the One is not, and has no part of existence, is the task of the fifth hypothesis. 794
Yet, even in non-Being, the One proves particularly resilient. It is only in relation to things that exist that
the One can be said to inexist, and if this is the case, then the One retains a residual relation to existent
entities, and must be treated as inextricable from being and becoming, in terms of the realization of
existents as well as pure forces of generation. The sixth hypothesis presses beyond the question of
relation, to the ontologically prohibitive proposition that the One has no state in Being whatsoever.795 This
nihilistic deepening of the fifth hypothesis is also a negative response to the question central to the second
791
Hallward, “Introduction,” 4.
TW, 102; BE, 500. According to Badiou, the axiom “indicates an essential structure of the theory of being,(ibid.,
187).
793
Plato, Parmenides, 159b-160b/390-391; Brumbaugh, Hypotheses, 159-64.
794
Ibid., 165-75; Plato, Parmenides, 160b-163b/391-4.
795
Ibid., 163b-164b/394-5; Brumbaugh, Hypotheses, 176-9.
792
158
hypothesis – can the One be without participating in being. Here existence is precisely what is barred
from the One, in order to necessitate a reclamation of the Multiple and of being in the seventh hypothesis.
“[I]f One is not, nothing is.”796 Parmenides and Socrates, the interlocutors of the dialogue, concur on this
point, yet since the terms in question have been problematized so thoroughly throughout the dialogue, it is
no surprise that the final hypothesis797 offers no clear resolution. “Whether one is or is not, it and the other
both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear in all things, in all ways, both in relation to
themselves and in relation to each other.”798 Under the pressure of the dialectic method, the fantasy of
unity – that which might be mistaken for an unambiguous foundation of the Real capable of anchoring
thought and being to universality – is exposed as a form of metaphysical idealism which simply cannot
stand up to its own logical demands. Yet, if the One is not, no simple solution is discovered by blindly
asserting the Multiple in its place. For, as Plato understands, fixing the one generates a passage to the
other: the One becomes Multiple; the Multiple appears as One. We are returned to the original claim of
Parmenides, if the One is, it is not Multiple, only now with a considerably richer and more paradoxical
understanding: just as pure being is Multiple, the moment it arises in thought or material, it exists, and, in
existence, the multiple comes to be held as One. This situation – what counts as one, in the terms of Alain
Badiou, which we shall nominate more simply as the Count for the present purposes – reminds us of the
strategic aspect of unification, and that existence can only be reduced absolutely to the One at the greatest
peril. Henceforth, a significant part of any critical vocation becomes the patient exposition of the
situations in which, despite the absence of the One as the absolute condition of being, the force of
unification is still in effect in existence.
Admittedly, it would be deeply naïve to presume that it is only art that bears the responsibility for
exemplifying this difficult pull between unity and multiplicity. Nonetheless, the traditional concerns of
the aesthetic sphere – the poietic force of generation, the immanence of aesthetic substance, mimesis and
the Real, the communication of meaning – frequently rehearse this fundamental metaphysical distinction
with particular clarity. Exemplary amongst such instances is the poem, [This work has been and continues
to be refined since 1969], by Robert Barry:
It is whole, determined, sufficient, individual, known, complete, revealed, accessible, manifest, effected,
effectual, directed, dependent, distinct, planned, controlled, unified, delineated, isolated, confined,
796
Plato, Parmenides, 166c/397.
Ibid., 165e-166c/396-7; Brumbaugh, Hypotheses, 185-6.
798
Plato, Parmenides, 166c/397.
797
159
confirmed, systematic, established, predictable, explainable, apprehendable, noticeable, evident,
understandable, allowable, natural, harmonious, particular, varied, interpretable, discovered, persistent,
diverse, composed, orderly, flexible, divisible, extendible, influential, public, reasoned, repeatable,
comprehendable, impractical, findable, actual, interrelated, active, describable, situated, recognizable,
analysable, limited, avoidable, sustained, changeable, defined, provable, consistent, durable, realized,
organized, unique, complex, specific, established, rational, regulated, revealed, conditioned, uniform,
solitary, given, improvable, involved, maintained, particular, coherent, arranged, restricted, and
presented.799
This poem pulls between minimalism and conceptualism,800 simplicity and complexity, the One and the
Multiple. Its form is thoroughly unremarkable, austere yet in no sense monolithic, presenting an inventory
of qualifiers. These seem empty in the sense that by prescribing the same work that they claim to
describe, impossibly asserting the latter even prior to effecting the former, these qualifiers remain devoid
of any immediate external reference. Yet, the poem is simultaneously pregnant with significance, as its
contained, non-referential minimalism is countered symmetrically by the expansive associations that arise
in following the implications of the auto-generative adjectives which constitute the poem. Minimalism
and conceptualism appear in this case to operate contrapuntally, located in an identical medium, but
allowing for significantly different interpretive rules to be called into play.
The claim explicit in the title of the poem – that “this work has been and continues to be refined” –
presents a significant point of confluence for the divergent trajectories of the work, the poet and the
reader. This moment of literary presentation, when the poem affirms its own existence as One, a singular
and unified entity (“this work”), is necessarily coextensive with the many contingencies of an ongoing
process of literary becoming (“has been and continues”), refinable, incomplete and multiple. As such, the
poem is a conceptual place-holder for the deep paradoxes which characterize the creative process in
general: the incompletion which inhabits many works at the generative and interpretive levels; the conflict
between the finite and infinite parts of the work; an understanding that generative novelty also negates the
so-called totality of that which pre-exists it.801
799
Robert Barry, [This work has and continues to be refined since 1969]. 1971, 20 November 2011
<http://www.ubu.com/concept/ barry_this.html>.
800
In conceptual poetry the central concept is both a stabilizing and a dynamic force. It provides stability inasmuch
as it constitutes the principal content of the poem, while it is dynamic in that in that this conceptual content is given
to numerous trajectories of significance and meaning. Thus, we discover in the conceptual poem a strange
materialism: material, for whether by thought or form, the work is granted sufficient stability to become an object of
scrutiny; strange, for this stability is definitively on the move – contingent, and full of potential interpretations,
frequently open, and yet, in another sense, essentially empty.
801
The dynamic of novelty announces itself concurrently in a number of ways, from Eliot‟s theory of historical
revisionism (T.S. Eliot, “Traditional and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1999), 13-22),
through to theories of violent rupture, forwarded by Futurists and Dadaists which are discussed subsequently.
160
Simply read from start to finish, with a minimum of semantic reflection, the reader might well be tempted
to mistake the deeply disjunctive syntax at the heart of the poem for a superficial but nonetheless binding
unity. We are enjoined to affirm that the poem is, as its initial first constituent qualifiers claim, an
exemplification of the One: “It is whole, determined, sufficient, individual, known, complete.” As the
work progresses, a number of descriptors appear to offer themselves in reaffirmation of the One in a work
which
is
“unified…isolated…harmonious…situated…limited…specific…uniform…particular...
restricted.”802 Yet, if the poem instantiates the One, how might we account for the manner in which the
Multiple reasserts itself in the work‟s being “dependent…varied…diverse…divisible…repeatable…
complex…improvable, involved… arranged?” To address this apparent contradiction, it is worth recalling
in full the concluding hypothesis of Plato‟s Parmenides: “whether one is or is not, it and the others both
are and are not, and both appear and do not appear in all things, in all ways, both in relation to themselves
and in relation to each other.”803
Upon closer inspection, the poem offers an acute testament to the instability and indeterminacy which
rapidly overshadow any attempt to claim the absolute ascendency of either the One or the Multiple.
Indeed, the reader is invited to recognize numerous possible arrangements or syntaxes from within this
parataxis. For Badiou, “the upshot of the aporias in the Parmenides...[reveal that] it is pointless to try to
deduce the existence (or non-existence) of the One: it is necessary to decide, and then assume the
consequences.”804 It is possible to discern this axiomatic imperative in the manner in which Barry‟s poem
marks the conditions of its intelligibility as its primary concern, rather than the consolidation of either the
Multiple
or
the
One,
by
aligning
“known…revealed…manifest…apprehendable,
noticeable,
evident…recognizable…realized… revealed… given… presented.” Alternately, we might construct a
syntax which accentuates the dynamic role of critical thought in the conceptual stabilization of a poem
unapologetically devoid of durable referential content: “accessible…explainable…understandable…
interpretable …describable…provable.” Moreover, there is sufficient evidence here that the poem appeals
to
an
immanent
realism
of
the
type
endorsed
in
the
present
“sufficient…known…revealed…persistent…actual…sustained…consistent.”
work,
Indeed,
since
what
it
is
is
the
counterpoint exposed in the poem between immanent revelation (the adjective “revealed” appears twice,
close to the beginning) and the will to “discover” through patient, critical exposition? What balance is
802
This is simply to select a few amongst many possible examples.
Plato, Parmenides, 166c/397.
804
Alain Badiou, “Platonism and Mathematical Ontology,” TW, 60 (51-60).
803
161
struck between the poem as the stable manifestation of a transcendental generative, indeed poietic, force,
and the poem as the indefinite progression of a multiplicity of contingent concepts?
That no stable answer to these questions is forthcoming – that Barry‟s poem reflects the same
undecidability between, and compossibility of, the Multiple and the One as is evident in Plato‟s
Parmenides – emphasizes the manner in which minimalist and conceptual poetry attempt indirectly to
indicate the undecidable part of thought and being which conditions both poietic creation and
metaphysical possibility. The poem presents the charged generative situation in which the cumulative
operation of the work – the poietic force which counts its constituents, its revisions and its indefinite
parameters as One – is unified without being a totality, since the poem clearly prescribes its constitutive
incompletion, its continuing refinement, its transposition or transumption from the realm of language to
that of thought, concept and imagination.
If it is pertinent here to recall that the minimalist aesthetic is popularly translated by Mies van der Rohe‟s
Bauhaus dictum – less is more805 – it is also important to recall Perreault‟s claim, cited above, that what is
minimal about minimalism is its means rather than its end806 – that there “is nothing minimal about the
„art‟ (craftsmanship, inspiration, or aesthetic stimulation) in Minimal art. If anything, in the best works
being done, it is maximal.”807 In this light, we might contend that Barry‟s poem presents the minimal
conditions which need to be in place for a work to persist, to be coherent and intelligible, while still
offering a remarkable insight to the generative plenum of poietic force.
Thus, although constitutively incomplete, the work nonetheless generates a minimalist recognition of
what might constitute the Real. Such a realism is knowable here only through an atopia, a poietic nonspace within which are incorporated the generative consonances and dissonances which arise between
inspiration, concept, language, syntax, context and the improvisatory character of interpretation. The
absolute independence and consequent indifference of the Real in no sense reduces the potential for
difference, in much the same way as the One cannot finally reduce the Multiple. We discover unfolding at
the heart of the poem, a startling example of the quantification of quality which marks the best
minimalism. Each possible arrangement of the numerous constituent qualifiers of the work presents an
instance of the Multiple being counted-as-One.
805
See page 38 of the present work. Ad Reinhardt, “Writings,” The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory
Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973), 167-8.
806
Perreault, “Minimal Abstract,” 260.
807
Ibid.
162
Minimalism and conceptualism intersect here, not merely in the way in which minimal means are brought
to maximum effect, but also in the implicit focus of the paratactic force at work in the poem upon unity
and Gestalt. Of similar significance are the unitary forms pursued by Robert Morris in his construction of
“simple regular and irregular polyhedrons”808 (Figure 54)809 which effect a holism that is maximally
engaged with both the conceptual and perceptual affirmation of objecthood in all three planes.810 Morris‟
exploration of this form of Gestalt is exemplary of minimalism‟s concern with the presentation of
aesthetic unity, the passage of self-reference to aesthetic immanence, and the parenthesis of relations
external to the work itself.
Figure 54: Robert Morris, Untitled (Battered Cubes), 1966.
Such works call to mind minimalist theories of nonreferentiality and nonrelationality.811 Ad Reinhardt, for
instance, embraced a radical monadism, a rejectionist dogma of art‟s ontological singularity which is
often nihilistic or apocalyptic in its tone: “Art-as-Art is a concentration on Art‟s essential nature. The
nature of art has not to do with the nature of perception or with the nature of light or with the nature of
808
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” MA, 228 (222-35).
Robert Morris, Untitled (Battered Cubes), 1966. Originally exhibited Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles.
810
Ibid., 225-6.
811
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 41-58.
809
163
space or with the nature of time or with the nature of mankind or with the nature of society.”812 This is
nowhere more visible than in Reinhardt‟s most austere black canvases which, instantiating the minimalist
logic of containment or convergence, exemplify the manner in which exclusion and restriction at once
effect a poietic transumption, or the constitution in an atopian space of what is deconstituted in
representational terms (Figures 55 and 56).813
Figure 55: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962.
812
Reinhardt, Writings, 173.
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962. Tate Modern, London. I reproduce the same painting here with
different balances of brightness and contrast in order to approximate the manner in which Reinhardt‟s initially
undifferentiated black canvases reveal unexpected depths and textures depending on the duration and manner of
one‟s exposure to the work.
813
164
Figure 56: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962; three different exposures of contrast and brightness juxtaposed.
By contrast, Michael Fried proposes deductive structures by which “[works] demand to be seen as
deriving from the framing edge – as having been „deduced‟ from it,”814 such as is the case in many of
Stella‟s shaped works (Figure 57).815
Figure 57: Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965.
Refusing any engagement with the One or the Multiple, Reinhardt‟s monochromatic work exemplifies the
manner in which minimalist works nonetheless count the Multiple as One by instantiating a monadic but
rejective autonomy. In the case of Stella‟s shaped work, it is possible to deduce the One from the whole
by the potent invocation of an aesthetic Gestalt. Several of Stella‟s Black Paintings address the relation of
part and whole quite differently, however. Painted on regular, rectangular canvases, these works
simultaneously intimate part and whole. The manner in which the chevrons of Die Fahne Hoch! (Figure
814
Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
(Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1998) 233.
815
Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
165
58)816 point to centre of the canvas unifies the work, offering it as a singularity or a whole, yet it is clear
that the points at which such inward movement might converge (four large rectangles), while lying on the
same plane as the work, lie beyond the canvas. In this case, the predication of the One clearly occurs
elsewhere, and the work functions as its metonymic equivalent – the analogical echo of the operation by
which multiplicity in existence might yet count-as-One.
Figure 58: Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!,
1959.
Figure 59: Kenneth Noland, Turnsole, 1961.
A more obvious visual analogy of the link between concentricity and unity emerges in considering the
circular works of Kenneth Noland (Figure 59).817 The centre of the canvas – the node in relation to which
both the expanding concentric series unfolds, as well as the target upon which visual attention is finally
focused – functions as a quasi-original generative point, exemplifying what I subsequently argue is one of
minimalism‟s principal modalities – containment. In each such cases of containment – Barry‟s poem,
Morris‟ unitary structures, Reinhardt‟s monochromes and Noland‟s centred deductions – the minimalist
work attests to the irreducible multiplicity of Being, rendering maximally transparent that it is quantity
816
817
Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Kenneth Noland, Turnsole, 1961. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
166
which is at the heart of ontology, albeit its aesthetic instantiation will always be an exploration of the
various techniques by which the Multiple comes to be counted-as-One.
8. THE COUNT
a) The subtraction of novelty
For the sake of clarity, it is necessary at this point to rehearse the fundamental tenets of Badiou‟s
ontology. Badiou argues that being qua being, pure ontology, is irreducibly multiple.818 However, he also
recognizes that the history of philosophy and thought is scarred by the misapprehension that Being can be
reduced to unity or the One: the contention that the One is, and all that is, is One. 819 The Parmenidean
thrust of philosophy, although subverted with particular force by transcendental philosophy, is never truly
exceeded. In this respect, Badiou instigates a major ontological revolution when he offers a recoupment
of Platonic thought820 within an ontology of the multiple,821 claiming through the conjunction of
mathematical and philosophical proof that the One is not, and that pure being is both thinkable and
obliquely presentable in terms of pure multiplicity.822 But if everything is multiple, how is it that things
exist in any unified or substantive form, no matter how contingent this form may be? To account for this
Badiou distinguishes between consistent and inconsistent multiplicity, or otherwise, structured and
unstructured multiplicity.823 He claims that those things which can be said to belong to being qua
existence, which exist, have consistency.824 Such consistency is presented in being as contingent unity or
a there-is-Oneness, even though it does not exhaust or reduce multiplicity.825 The act of presentation is
therefore dependent on multiplicity being counted-as-One, which, for obvious reasons, Badiou refers to as
818
BE, 23.
Badiou reminds us of “the stubbornness of the[...] residues of the One‟s empire” (MP, 57). See ibid., 103-4; NN,
7-8, 10-1, 14. “[O]ntology has built the portico of its ruined temple out of the following experience: what presents
itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one” (BE, 23).
820
It is, after all, Plato‟s version of Parmenides that furnishes our knowledge of the One.
821
BE, 23-4, 31, 36-7; Badiou, “Platonism,” 60; Norris, Badiou, 39.
822
BE, 40-1, 44-5, 48. See Hallward, “Introduction,” 3-4.
823
BE, 25, 28.
824
Hallward, Badiou, 90.
825
BE, 24, 29.
819
167
the count-as-One, or, the Count.826 However, as the Count does not eliminate multiplicity from
presentation, there necessarily remains some uncounted, inconsistent part – the void – in any presentation
or existential situation.827 As the unpresentable part of every presentation, the empty set,828 the void is
distributed everywhere.829 It is precisely that errant foundational element which is a non-element,
subtracted from every Count, but by this very subtraction, implicit in the Count itself.830 By a sort of
spectral presence, the void is thus unpresented in every Count.831 Consequently, for the Count as
presentation to be guaranteed its consistency, it must be re-presented – literally presented a second time,
or counted again.832 So there are two principal processes in the guarantee of the consistency of existence:
presentation, or the Count; and re-presentation, or the count of the Count. To the extent that Badiou
asserts that ontology is ultimately thinkable only in terms of structure and structuration,833 we could say
that if presentation or the Count structures, re-presentation or the Count of the Count acts as
metastructure.834 Within these basic conditions, entities appear with varying intensities,835 are subject to
change,836 and sometimes also disappear, become inconsistent multiples, or enter into non-being (are
destroyed).
The crucial demonstrations of such appearance and disappearance take place in what Badiou refers to as
the typology of Being, a further distinction within an existential situation in terms of belonging and
inclusion. What belongs ( )837 to a situation838 must also be present in it as an element,839 while what is
included ( ) in a situation is incorporated by the state of situation as a whole, or re-presented.
Numerically, elements included always exceed elements which belong,840 much as the potential of a river
826
Ibid., 24-5, 29. The upper-case Count is generally preferred to preserve the distinctness of this ontological
operation from other types of counting, since several examples included in the present work require specific
reference to the latter which should not be confused with the former.
827
Ibid., 56.
828
MP, 124.
829
BE, 57.
830
BE, 58, 93.
831
BE, 55. “The void is the name of being – of inconsistency – according to a situation, inasmuch as presentation
gives us therein an unpresentable access, thus non-access, to this access, in the mode of what is not-one, or
composable of ones; thus what is qualifiable within the situation solely as the errancy of nothing” (ibid., 56).
832
BE, 93-4.
833
BE, 27.
834
BE, 94; Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 102-4.
835
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum,
2009), 118-20.
836
Hallward, “Introduction,” 2.
837
The parenthesized symbols are those used in set theory to indicate belonging and inclusion.
838
It is important to recall that what is termed a situation here could also be called a set.
839
BE, 96.
840
Hallward, Badiou, 88-9.
168
to flow its course is not exhausted by the actual passage of water. Equally, we might argue that the
potential flow of a river is contingent on the actual presence of water. In a similar manner, inclusion,
despite its apparent quantitative superiority, is precisely a variation of belonging. 841 Yet we miss
something crucial if, standing in a river at a particular moment, we fail to recognize that the potentiality of
its course is matched by the actuality of the water flowing round our bodies – a normal situation in which
inclusion and belonging coincide. From these considerations, Badiou extrapolates his tripartite typology
of Being: a normal situation, in which an entity belongs and is included, is presented and re-presented;842
an excrescent situation, in which an entity is included without belonging, is represented but not presented
and thus, in a sense, imported to a situation;843 a singular situation, in which an entity belongs but is not
included, is presented but not represented – exported from a situation by other parts within the
situation.844
What remains unclear from Badiou‟s theory of the metastructure is precisely how to define the force
which underlies the process of the Count. He is adamant that “[m]etastructure…cannot simply re-count
the terms of the situation and re-compose consistent multiplicities, nor can it have pure operation as its
operational domain.”845 It is therefore neither fully another presentation nor fully an operation. It is
definitely self-reflexive, but since the structure on which this self-reflexivity rests itself is tied to the void,
and so has no possible final predicate, it seems almost as though Badiou hands the metastructural
operation over to an exponential and infinite reflexivity. Certainly, as with Badiou‟s entire system, this
force is registered axiomatically, and thus in terms of directedness of thought. It is doubtful, however, that
this formulation – or that which Badiou offers in relation to the trans-ontological event846 – satisfactorily
unravels such force on its own terms. The present work aims in part to designate this gap between
presentation and re-presentation not merely as an operation, but as a force. This force is ontological, to be
sure, but merely claiming that it is the force of structuration goes only a little way in exposing it qua
force. Finally, I will argue that what Badiou terms metastructure from the perspective of ontology, and
re-presentation from the viewpoint of existence, is in fact precisely a para-ontological force which
incorporates while recognizing the distinction of Being from existence – a poietic exemplarity selfreflexively directed towards its autopoietic realization.
841
Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 103.
BE, 99.
843
Ibid., 99-100
844
Ibid.
845
Ibid. 95.
846
Indeed, the event names such a radical force, but, as it is strictly trans-ontological, it should not be mistaken for
the properly ontological force of structuration.
842
169
The charge of Badiou‟s existential system847 rests upon the possibility of radical beginning and change, 848
heralded by the sudden eruption of aleatory events.849 Such events are trans-ontological850 – “fundamental
anomal[ies],”851 at once singular in their transection of an existential situation, yet drawn from the
multiplicity of this same situation852 – and disrupting ontology itself as the advent of novelty.853 No event
can be predicted or caused,854 and it disappears almost as soon as it appears.855 It is, however, “something
which happens for this world, not in this world, but for this world…an affirmative split”856 constituting
the conditions within which active configurations of knowledge are defined in retrospective relation to
events.857 In naming an event, we engage in an ongoing process of discerning its consequences, 858
expressing fidelity to,859 and so defining, the vectors which emerge from an evental site.860 Thus the
valences are generated which retrospectively locate the event to which they attest. Badiou terms these
consequences a truth,861 and the manner in which truths take shape, a subject of truth.862
In this sense, truth relates neither to correspondences nor transcendence,863 but to the radical potential for
an ongoing realignment of existential information.864 Truth is a generic multiplicity, in the sense that it
847
Here it is worth recalling that Badiou insists upon the distinction Being and existence.
Badiou, “The Event as Trans-Being,” TW, 100-1.
849
Ibid., 102; BE, 191, 198.
850
Badiou, “Event,” 101.
851
Hallward, Badiou, 99.
852
On the concurrency of singularity and multiplicity, see Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of
Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 68.
853
Ibid., 68-9; Badiou, “Event,” 103.
854
These are “precarious supplement[s] whose sole strength resides in there being no available predicate[s] capable
of subjecting them to knowledge” (Badiou, “Truth,” 148). See Norris, Badiou, 126.
855
An event is an “originary disappearance supplementing the situation for the duration of a lightning flash; situated
within it only in so far as nothing of it subsists” (Badiou, “Truth,” 124).
856
Alain Badiou, “The Subject of Art,” transcribed Lydia Kerr, The Symptom, 20 November 2011
<http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/? page_id=1616>.
857
BE, 178; Badiou, “Truth,” 125-7.
858
“As the event arises from chance experience, and disappears just as quickly, it remains only a trace. Intervening
upon this trace comprises the notion of naming, which solidifies the Being of the event by marking it as the
undecidable void whose background it is…As a process determined by one of the conditions, the event reaches its
truth through the determination of a name…Naming is thus the trace of philosophy‟s intervention upon truths” (MP,
21-2).
859
MP, 81; Alain Badiou, “Eight Theses on the Universal,” TW, 147-8; Hallward, Badiou, xxiii.
860
This site, “on the edge of the void,” (BE, 175), is the “minimal effect of structure which can be conceived; it is
such that it belongs to the situation, whilst what belongs to it [the event] does not” (ibid.); See Badiou, “Event,” 101;
Badiou, “Eight Theses,” 147-8.
861
Emerging from an event, a truth is “a multiple...that the fidelity [to this event] constructs, bit by bit; it is what the
fidelity gathers together and produces” (Badiou, Ethics, 67-8).
862
The subject is “a finite moment of the generic procedure [of a truth]” (MP, 108) – the concrete manifestation of
that which is inaugurated by a truth, and continued by an infinite truth.
863
Badiou, “Truth,” 128.
848
170
contains no single “predicative trait”865 which predetermines its content;866 it is indiscernible from the
objective perspective of a situation alone,867 and must be decided by commitment.868 Truth is infinite to
the extent that its consequences are indefinitely progressive,869 constitutively undecidable, and yet elicit
the potential for infinite affirmation.870 Situations in which truth appears finite, Badiou calls veridical:
“anticipations of...what will have been if truth attains completion,”871 which projection is necessary for
the achievement of knowledge. Finally, truth reinvigorates the universal, presenting “an incalculable
emergence, rather than a describable structure,”872 a “universalizing diagonal,”873 which is constitutively
incomplete and open, for all time, and potentially for every entity capable of expressing its fidelity.874
Of particular concern to the present purpose is the manner in which art – one of Badiou‟s four conditions
through which subject, truth and event are intertwined875 – exemplifies the universality of ontological
quantity. More specifically still, our attention turns to minimalism for its austere quantitative modelling,
which draws equal attention to the negation implicit in the disruption of the status quo instantiated by
artistic novelty, 876 and the positive activity of its taking-place. Synthesizing this apparent opposition is an
intimate concern of the Count, and minimalists habitually interrogate, on symbolic terms, the difficulties
of calculation through the incorporation of numerical and alphabetical sequences, phonemic utterances,
lists and series of various kinds. That this symbolism is exemplary of the concrete aspects of the work,
and the ontological situation to which these refer, is a key contention. In this light such minimalism
attempts no less ambitious a task than to clarify metastructure itself – the Count of the Count, or the
procedural interstice between what is presented or counted, and that which is represented or counted
again.
864
“[I]t is because it is included within the situation in the form of a singular indeterminacy of its concept, and
because it is subtracted from the classificatory grasp of the language of the [situation that it]... is a truth of the
situation as such, an immanent production of its pure multiple being, a truth of its being qua being – as opposed to a
knowledge of this or that regional particularity of the situation” (Badiou, “Truth,” 127). See Badiou, “Event,” 104.
865
Badiou, “Truth,” 123.
866
Badiou, “Eight Theses,” 154; Hallward, Badiou, xxiii.
867
Ibid., xxvii; Badiou, “Truth,” 132.
868
Ibid., 124.
869
MP, 81.
870
Badiou, “Eight Theses,” 149-50.
871
Badiou, “Truth,” 130; see ibid., 130-1.
872
Badiou, “Eight Theses,” 146.
873
Ibid,,153.
874
Ibid., 153-4; MP, 81.
875
MP, 33-6.
876
“„Negation,‟ because if something happens as new, it cannot be reduced to the objectivity of the situation where
it happens. So, it is certainly like a negative exception to the regular laws of this objectivity.” Alain Badiou,
Destruction, Negation, Subtraction: on Pier Paolo Passolini, Graduate Seminar, Art Center College of Design in
Pasadena, February 6, 2007, 20 November 2011 <http://www.lacan.com/badpas.htm>.
171
The potential of aesthetic novelty in relation to the Count rests quite precisely on a further distinction of
considerable importance to Badiou‟s ontology – that of destructive from subtractive negation. The former
offers an eliminative account of novelty which asserts that emergent identity is related to the destruction
of an existing state.877 The predicate of subtraction, by contrast, is poietic or productive, since the
multiplicity upon which subtraction is performed remains undiminished. Art illustrates this point well:
All creations, all novelties, are in some sense the affirmative part of a negation…because if a creation is
reducible to a negation of the common laws of objectivity, it completely depends on them concerning its
identity. So the very essence of a novelty implies negation, but must affirm its identity apart of the
negativity of negation.878
It is on the basis of a subtractive ontology that Badiou is able to draw out the consequences of his primary
ontological axiom: “[w]hat has to be declared is that the [O]ne,879 which is not, solely exists as operation.
In other words: there is no [O]ne, only the count-as-One.”880 To state the case in brief: if the One is not,
then Being is Multiple. Yet, there is no way in which multiplicity in itself can be presented, 881 which
means a subtraction from pure multiplicity must take place in order for Being to be presented. It is this
subtraction which we refer to as the Count. It is by such subtraction that we come to distinguish what
appears and is presented in existence – that which is subtracted from pure or inconsistent multiplicity,
which counts-as-One – from that which is indiscernible or unpresentable in existence – namely ontology
itself, which is uncountable, infinite, inconsistent or pure multiplicity.882 In Hallward‟s estimation,
“Badiou‟s subtractive conception of multiplicity sets him sharply apart from many of his contemporaries,
who…generally seek in some sense to express, intuit, figure or otherwise articulate the multiple.”883
b) Configuring the Count
Most significant to the present argument is that the discernment of quantity or calculation is often most
conspicuous in art which places an emphasis on accumulation. Central to this proposition is the
877
Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 56.
Alain Badiou, “Destruction, Negation, Subtraction.”
879
For the sake of consistency, the upper-case One, count-as-One, and Count, Multiple and Multiplicity will be
preferred.
880
BE, 24.
881
BE, 27.
882
BE, 23-9; Badiou, “Truth,” 129.
883
Hallward, “Introduction,” 5.
878
172
understanding that mathematical ontology renders infinity both actual and immanent.884 Such infinity is
clarified by transfinite cardinality which reflects a law of identification by numerical substitution, or
infinite metonymy, confirming that every set by which unities might be organized contains a potentially
infinite number of subsets,885 so that there are an infinite number of infinities.886 The Count is not only
eminently possible in this light, but an imperative.887 It is minimalism which the present work claims is
most adept at offering an aesthetic configuration of the Count capable of intensifying that which Badiou
intends ontologically by the term.
Of the most transparent and significant aesthetic instantiations of the Count are presented in works of
minimalism‟s two seminal composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. As discussed above, Glass‟ Two
Pages is exemplary with respect to minimalist techniques of additive and subtractive modules, and the
work is effectively a series of expansions and contractions predicated on strictly quantitative
enumerations. More subtle, but no less subject to a logic of accumulation, is the pulse-pattern technique
of Reich‟s Music for 18 Musicians (Track 14).888 The strict pulsation constitutes a persistent aural bulk,
varied by the subtle addition and subtraction of voices and accompanying dynamic fluctuations which
combine to give the music an almost undulating alternation of intensities which owes indubitably to
cumulative, quantitative elements of musical substance. Of comparably physical terms, are the numerous
serial sculptures of Judd and LeWitt, but particularly interesting for its articulation of an equally
conceptual and physical approach to the Count, is Flavin‟s series of light sculptures, the nominal three (to
William of Ockham) (Figure 60).889 This work presents with parsimonious clarity – recalling that such
clarity is at the heart of ontological non-complication associated with Ockham, to whom the title refers890
– a situation in which the ordinal and cardinal logics of enumeration coincide. The ordinal is evident in
the sequencing of its components – respectively one, two and three fixtures – while cardinality regards
these components, or groups of fixtures, as monads irrespective of number of fixtures in each group, and
to this extent they contain both the potential for cardinal substitution and an ordinary quantitative
884
Badiou, “Truth,” 129.
BE, 63, 97. See ibid., 267-75.
886
BE, 146.
887
NN, 1.
888
Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians. ECM, 1978.
889
Dan Flavin, the nominalist three (to William of Ockham), 1964. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
890
Govan goes as far as to suggest that “[o]ut of Ockham‟s nominalism Flavin crafted his minimalism” (Michael
Govan, “Irony and Light,” Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, ed. Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell (New York: Dia Art
Foundation, 2004), 37).
885
173
dimension. The nominalist affirmation of autonomous entities informs Flavin‟s search for “primary
figures”891 which favour transparency and purity of form and medium over complexity.892
Figure 60: Dan Flavin, the nominalist three (to William of Ockham), 1964.
However, to the extent that Flavin‟s work effective instantiates a minimalist logic of distribution, its
concern with monistic containment and order is supplemented by a far more corporeal experience of
quantity. For the substance of this work is finally inextricable from its luminescence, and its expansion in
every direction emphasizes that any account of its phenomenology necessarily incorporates sensory and
conceptual experience. Equally concretized by somatic inference is the Count of Glass‟ “Knee-Play 1”893
from the opera Einstein on the Beach (Track 15).894 Composed to be performed at high volumes, the
thundering bass of the electric organ which opens the work, consists of three notes which outline the
entire harmonic of the composition.895 This sequence, one of the simplest of all harmonic progressions,
891
Dan Flavin, qtd. in ibid., 38.
Ibid., 37.
893
Knee-play is the term Glass and Wilson use for the various relatively brief interludes (although the first is a
prelude and the final a postlude) which present opportunities for changing the mise-en-scène, as well as conceptual
and thematic connectors for the different parts of this immense work.
894
Philip Glass, “Knee-Play 1,” Einstein on the Beach. Nonesuch, 1993.
895
This progression is written C: F: vi-V-I.
892
174
but with a strong sense of gravity,896 is interrupted by the utterance of the number “two.” Zero and one
perhaps implicit, the Count is already underway, although it is stilted, non-sequential and irregular –
continued by the recitation of random single-digit numbers by two female voices over the steady thunder
of the organ. The arbitrary calling of numbers gives way to two equally asymmetrical but clearly poetic
monologues which are subsequently alternated with the numerical recitation. That this irregularity is
framed by the powerful chordal progression is strengthened by the entrance of the austere ascending line
of the chorus sung in octaves which stabilizes the progression, its tensions and resolutions.
The encounter is indeed sublime, recalling that, for Kant, what marks an aesthetic of the sublime is
precisely the manner in which Reason897 – which we quite legitimately associate with metastructure or the
Count – stabilizes what is an initially overwhelming and discomforting sensory encounter with that which
is “absolutely large.”898 The “negative pleasure” which results from sublime experience is a clear
extension of Edmund Burke‟s contention, that “[w]hatever...excite[s] the ideas of pain, and
danger...whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”899 More important, however, is the Kantian distinction
between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. The former attempts to approximate sublime
magnitude in spatial and temporal terms, by “numerical concepts”900 and the intuitive estimation of
magnitude.901 The latter more evidently emerges in the dynamics of thought and the imagination, which
allow us indirectly to confront and overcome the fear-arousing objects and situations: “we merely think of
896
The sequencing of chords in music results in what is generally termed an harmonic progression, which generally
contains tonal centres towards which the entire progression gravitates, and in relation to which harmonic shifts or
new tonal centres (modulations) are generated. The effect is the accumulation and release of tension, the perception
and teleology of which are determined in equal measure by mathematics, physics, psycho-acoustic association, and
cultural norms.
897
As is well known, the Kantian position, while privileging an encounter with nature over artifice, also recognizes
that “sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of
our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to the nature outside us” (Kant, Judgment, 123). More recent
views, following an increasingly scientific understanding of the sublime feeling (Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London
and New York: Routledge, 2006), 49-50) recognize that the sublime is distributed between natural, artificial and
technological phenomena (see Michel Deguy, “The Discourse of Exaltation: Contributions to a Re-Reading of
Pseudo-Longinus,” Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, 12-3; Shaw, Sublime, 7-8, 28,
124). Indeed, for Kant the distinction is not absolute, but relates to teleological judgement: “[g]iven that we find
something purposelike in nature‟s products, let us call nature‟s produce (causality) a technic” (Kant, Judgment, 271).
898
Kant, Judgment, 103.
899
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1987), 39.
900
Ibid., 107.
901
Ibid.
175
the case where we might possibly want to put up resistance against [an overwhelming magnitude], and
that any resistance would in that case be utterly futile.”902
Kant does not, however, signal here “that there are two kinds of sublime, the one mathematical and the
other dynamical,”903 for “mathematical synthesis and dynamical synthesis do not exclude one another.” 904
Indeed, in “Knee-Play 1” the meeting of two languages of the infinite – mathematics and music – are
clarified by these two dialects of the sublime. For where the pure quantity of these sounds – their scale,
loudness and presence – refers to the dynamically sublime, the inclusion of numerical sequences by way
of the explicit recitation of numbers and the implicit harmonic proportions of the music, recalls the
mathematical sublime. It is precisely upon the productive tension of the two that the effect and coherence
of the composition‟s Count rest.
The recitation of numbers in “Knee-Play 1,” both aleatory and ordered, suggests both the spatial and
temporal quantification of existence – the means by which fundamental material consistency and metrical
regularity might be deduced. In other of his compositions, Glass prefers the fundamental pitch language
of solfège, in which linguistic syllables (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti) are substituted for sequential pitches.
Significant echoes of this technique are discernible in John Adams‟ On the Transmigration of Souls,905 a
threnody for those who died in the 9/11 attacks, which incorporates lists of names, addresses and
telephone numbers as the haunting quantitative substitutes for those missing or dead immediately after the
attacks. The cumulative and metonymic logics of sequences and lists are explored to great effect in Nico
Muhly‟s “Archive” (Track 16)906 from the song-cycle Mothertongue. Muhly‟s is a fascinating exploration
of number and listing as means of instantiating fundamental musico-linguistic material, but also offers a
subtle investigation of their role as mnemonic ciphers:907 postcodes, addresses, telephone numbers,
alphabetical lists and solfege syllables reflect not only on intrinsic quantities, but act as markers for place,
identity, and the crossing of personal, interpersonal and cultural histories. Thus, the postcodes delivered
with a growing aggression and intensity in “Monster” (Track 17),908 the final movement of the
Mothertongue cycle, might as legitimately be interpreted as the markers for the reduction of humanity to
numerical sequences – as in the numbers assigned to prisoners, the biopolitical tattooing of the Shoah, or
902
Ibid., 119-20.
Lyotard, Lessons, 90.
904
Ibid., 95.
905
John Adams, On the Transmigration of Souls, 2002.
906
Nico Muhly, “Archive,” Mothertongue. Bedroom Community, 2008.
907
Nico Muhly, E-mail and recorded interview. 12-22 November 2012.
908
Nico Muhly, “Monster,” Mothertongue. Bedroom Community, 2008.
903
176
identity- or social security numbers – as they might be reference to the space which individuals occupy
and in which they interact.909
The archive is not unknown to the minimalist aesthetic: at the heart of Josipovici‟s novel, The Inventory,
is an exhaustive list of the unspecified items of a deceased man‟s estate, a list which occasions the
disturbing insight that human life is bound to a utilitarian, statistical abstraction. Equally we might look to
the example of Samuel Beckett‟s work, which in numerous places reflects the realization that existence is
numerically quantifiable and approximated by a Count. Hence the poignancy of the unforgiving
minimalism which opens “A Piece of Monologue:” “Birth was the death of him. Again. Words are few.
Dying too...From funeral to funeral. To now. This night. Two and a half billion seconds. Again. Two and
a half billion seconds. Hard to believe so few...Thirty thousand nights. Hard to believe so few.”910
Yet it is continuity, rather than the discontinuity of death, however imminent, which fuels the Count.
Indeed, continuity is central to Muhly‟s “Archive” – a Count within which number is replaced by the
rapid recitation of the letters of the alphabet, a sequence which retains its ordinal and quantitative
significance. Finally, as the complexity of musical information mounts, so other verbal information is
introduced – numbers, addresses, narrative fragments. However, the alphabetic litany which opens the
work remains a powerful marker of radical poietic material – both musical and linguistic – and the
necessity of subjecting these to some sort of archival Count in order to generate aesthetic cohesion and
the possibility that such substance persists.
Of a different but no less provocative species is the alphabetic Count of Aragon‟s well-known poem,
“Suicide:”
SUICIDE
Abcdef
ghIjkl
mnopqr
stuvw
x
909
y z911
Ibid.
Samuel Beckett, “A Piece of Monologue,” CDW, 425.
911
Louis Aragon, “Suicide,” qtd. Mark A. Pegrum, Challenging Modernity: Dada Between Modern and Postmodern
(New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), 265.
910
177
The central contention of the work is that by its taking-place, the substance of the poem self-reflexively
consumes its poetic potential. The mediating activity of the poet, becomes one of perpetual, selfsacrificial exhaustion, indeed suicide. No means of figuring poiesis remains except the statement of the
quantitative constituents of the poem in their most minimal form: “letters of the alphabet spelled out in
sequence.”912 The Count is contained by an admirably severe concision, one which displaces meaning
into form,913 form into the atomic elements of writing – elements which are recalculated by the alphabetic
sequence to indicate the “finite and infinite possibility of the limited set;”914 the suicide of predetermined
entities constitutes a rebirth of poietic language. It is the affirmation of poietic potentiality which must be
recalled at the heart of the Count, lest it become a purely procedural operation. This is nowhere clearer
than in the subtle optimism which is invested in both poetry and reader in the concrete poem by Eric
Andersen, “I Have Confidence in You,”915 which, to my mind, presents the best of minimalism and its
productive relationship to quantitative ontology:
Figure 61: Eric Andersen, I Have Confidence in You, 1965.
912
Johanna Drucker, “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text,” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed.
Charles Bernstein (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1998), 147.
913
Pegrum, Challenging Modernity, 265.
914
Drucker, Visual Performance, 147.
915
Eric Andersen, “I Have Confidence in You,” 1965. John Cage, ed., Notations (New York: Something Else,
1969), unpaginated.
178
9. MINIMALISM OF NEGATION AND THE TAKING PLACE OF QUANTITY
a) Minimalist negation made manifest
Minimalism reasserts the quantitative element of the Real, and thus the basis for a quantitative ontology,
not by suppressing quality, but rather by presenting minimal impediment to the experience of the qualities
in themselves – whether perceptual or conceptual – of a particular aesthetic object. However axiomatic
the formalization of ontology may be, a realist position – a minimal phenomenology of the type to which
aesthetic minimalism appears to testify – can never be reduced to a decision between quantity and quality.
Both quantity and quality persist in the minimalist object. However, if it is the qualities of an object
which render it intelligible, this persistence – itself the mark of the Real – is knowable only through the
mute indifference of quantity. For quality and quantity to coexist in an object, they must be grounded in
the Real – the persistence, necessarily contingent and within a progressive temporality, of quantity.
Minimalism habitually aspires to render the qualities of its objects maximally visible through various
processes of reduction, formal simplicity, repetition, and processual transparency. In extreme instances,
minimalism proscribes quality itself. Ad Reinhardt, most famous for the black monochromatic paintings
referred to above, provides us with a poignant negative manifesto – his “Six General Canons or the Six
Noes” and “Twelve Technical Rules (or How to Achieve the Twelve Things to Avoid)” – which comes as
close as one might realistically hope to a militant minimalist engagement between aesthetics and nihilism:
No realism or existentialism…No impressionism…No expressionism or surrealism…No fauvism,
primitivism, or brute art…No constructivism, sculpture, plasticism, or graphic arts. No collage, paste,
papers, sand, or string…no ‘tromp-l’loeil,’ interior decoration, or architecture.916
No texture…[Painting] techniques are unintelligent and to be avoided. No accidents or automatism…No
brushwork or calligraphy…No signature or trademarking…No sketching or drawing…No line or
outline…No shading or streaking…No forms…No figure or fore- or back-ground. No volume or mass, no
cylinder, sphere, or cone, or cube…No push or pull. „No shape or substance‟…No design…No
Colours…Colours are barbaric, physical, unstable, suggest life, „cannot be completely controlled‟ and
“should be concealed.‟ No white. „White is a colour‟…White on white is „a transition from pigment to
light‟ and „moving pictures‟…No light…No space. Space should be empty, should not project, and should
not be flat…Space divisions within the painting should not be seen…No time…There is no ancient or
916
Ad Reinhardt, “Twelve Rules for a New Academy,” Art-as-Art: the selected writing of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara
Rose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1975) 205.
179
modern, no past or future in art. A work of art is always present.‟ The present is the future of the past, and
the past of the future…No size or scale…No movement. „Everything is on the move. Art should be
still‟…No object, no subject, no matter. No symbols, images, visions or ready-mades. Neither pleasure nor
pain. No mindless working or mindless nonworking. No chess playing.917
Reinhardt‟s manifesto attempts to conceptualize an art of pure quantity. It proscribes all relation, and so
any process which potentially might end the predominance of a work‟s particular qualities over its generic
existence. As a set of theoretical propositions, it “takes Minimalist reductivism as far as, or farther than, it
can go.”918 Reinhardt‟s ideal forces both artist and artefact from the traditional ground of aesthetic
expression – representation, relation, imagination, expression, communication – and into the realm of
pure quantity. So taxing is the process of generating such work – either in terms of its radical conception,
or as the telos of a process of extreme reductionism, eliminativism or rejectivism919 – that it is difficult to
imagine Reinhardt‟s work exercising anything other than a relentless pressure towards non-existence. Yet,
this would fail to capture the manner in which these paintings, in the very midst of his relentless
uncompromising refusal, effect a powerful instantiation of the Real, examined in the terms exposed
above, as the quantitative part of an entity which persists in the forward passage of time according to
certain contingent existential conditions or laws.
“Reinhardt‟s career represents a progressive simplification of the two primary elements of representation
on canvas: form…and colour,”920 suggests Strickland. Here is envisioned “the end of the fundamentally
delusory enterprise of representation.”921 Reflected in this work is an apotheosis of the confluence of the
minimalist aesthetic with the modernist desire for autonomy. Its will is to evade the existential chains
imposed by mimesis and its accompanying compulsion to repeat, and by repetition, to master the world.
As Yves Alain Bois explains, such extreme abstraction as Reinhardt‟s,
[f]reed from all extrinsic conventions...was meant to bring forth the pure parousia of its own essence, to tell
the final truth and thereby terminate its course. The pure beginning, the liberation from tradition, the „zero
degree‟ that was searched for by the first generation of abstract painters could not but function as an omen
of the end. One did not have to wait for the „last painting‟of Ad Reinhardt to be aware that through its
historicism (its linear conception of history) and through its essentialism (its idea that something like the
917
Ibid., 205-07.
Strickland, Minimalism, 45.
919
Strickland‟s designation of Reinhardt as a “rejectivist” (ibid., 42) is particularly appropriate, as it demonstrates
that Reinhardt‟s appeal to the force of negation is active rather than structurally necessitated.
920
Ibid., 51.
921
Ibid.
918
180
essence of painting existed, veiled somehow, and waiting to be unmasked), the enterprise of abstract
painting could not but understand its birth as calling for its end. 922
Extending Yves Alain Bois‟ claim that abstraction is emblematic of aesthetic modernism,923 might we not
say that minimalism, by the manner in which is seeks absolute abstraction as its post intimate quantity,
reflects once again a remarkable pull between the modern and the postmodern; between art as presentness
and anti-art as pure presence.
The “Six Noes” infringe on the notion of an aesthetic purity conventionally guaranteed by the assumption
of the critical and terminological norms established in the notion of a movement. However, we should not
mistake Reinhardt‟s ban on realism for a decisive subversion of the Real – at least in the terms in which it
is proposed in the present work – but rather as a progressive challenge to the subjugation of quantity to
quality. This brand of minimalism claims as its imperative an absolute objecthood which opposes the socalled objectification of the aesthetic work through the clearly subjective processes of creative generation
and interpretation. Probing the limit between formlessness and form, Reinhardt‟s work culminates in the
negative presentation of the poietic process itself. Its domain is the minimal aggregation of the aesthetic
qualities required for the senses to cohere upon the work, or, stated otherwise, the properly quantitative
element of the work at its most radical. In view of this threshold, Reinhardt‟s concern with negation
paradoxically constitutes a significant point of poietic affirmation, one which emerges from the minimal
persistence required for an object to emerge in existence, in conception or actuality, and to be recognized
as existent rather than non-existent. This minimal point – an austere but decisive gesture of generation –
recalls the void, the charge of nothingness which seems to echo in every tracing of the passage between
radical presence (“[a] work of art is always present”) and absolute absence (nothingness). Such is the
flavour of a minimalism which emerges by tracing the progressive intrication of abstraction and reduction
in the work of Reinhardt. This is clearly evidenced by following the development and progressive
abstraction in Reinhardt‟s career and work.
Along with much abstract art, Reinhardt‟s early work presents a sustained interrogation of space itself. In
Study for a Painting (Figure 62),924 line and shape constitute simultaneously the regular geometries of
mathematics and the irregular shapes of biomorphic allusion. The effect is a dynamic alternation between
a static two dimensionality and the depth of movement generated both by the chromatic composition of
922
Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” Painting as a Model (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT,
1990), 230-1.
923
Ibid., 230.
924
Ad Reinhardt, Study for a Painting, 1938. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
181
the work and the arrangement of its irregular constituent shapes. In contrast to the rapid alternation of the
atonal black and white, Reinhardt‟s deployment of primary colour – red, in particular – renders irregular
the pace at which the viewer perceives the work. The relation between figure and ground further exploits
this movement. The central quadrilateral, outlined in black and which is bordered on the left by a tapering
green band, recedes towards the right, but, simultaneously, by virtue of the placement of the elliptical
figure on the right hand side of the painting, its top edge is brought towards us. At the same time,
however, the irregular red shape retires to the rear of the field, leaning away from the viewer. Reinhardt
reflects not only on space itself, but also on the competing perspectives which attend visual perception,
each of which also institutes a particular temporal relation between subject and object.
Figure 62: Ad Reinhardt, Study for a Painting, 1938.
Figure 63: Ad Reinhardt, Collage, 1950.
This abstract rehearsal of the fundamental aspects of our visuo-spatial experience – colour, depth,
movement – is driven further in Reinhardt‟s later work. By the time of Collage (Figure 63),925 completed
in 1940, fluid biomorphic figures have given way to a cubist concern with simultaneism,926 visual
interruption and a stricter geometric approach to the division of space. Here we see the manner in which
Reinhardt attempts to resolve the problems associated with the accurate distillation of spatial dimensions
by working in relief. If Study for a Painting recalls the gestural tension between radical constructivism
and abstraction exposed in the work of such painters as Miro, Kandinsky and Malevich, then Collage
brings to mind the influence of cubism, Mondrian‟s neo-Plasticism and the work of American
925
926
Ad Reinhardt, Collage, 1950. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The significance of simultaneism is highlighted in subsequent argumentation.
182
abstractionists Burgoyne Diller and Stuart Davis.927 The frenetic composition of Collage reflects upon the
process through which “circles and semicircles disappeared” in Reinhardt‟s art, “as organic shapes were
rejected for rectilinearity and…polygons were gradually simplified into what he called „bricks‟.”928
Complex composition increasingly gives way in Reinhardt‟s work to an austerity which pinpoints and
contains the most fundamental elements of visual expression. He also preferred increasingly minimal
titles,929 removing all reference to technique and focusing instead on the sequence in which works were
produced, numbering them meticulously, and on his significantly reduced palette – various tones of white
and grey in the case of Number 107 (Figure 64),930 and of red in Abstract Painting (Red) (Figure 65).931
The formal regularization progressively explored in terms of line and texture in his earlier work, is
increasingly displaced into subtler gradations and contrasts of tone. Thus, the vestiges of a gestural
abstract expressionism, which are still evident in the strong horizontal strokes of the lighter greys and
whites of Number 107, are practically invisible in the later work. Abstract Painting (Red) is divided into
seven rectangular horizontal bands of equal height. Every second band, beginning either at the top or
bottom, is subdivided along its length into three squares. The work alternates between three shades of red:
a deep maroon and a lighter orange which are distributed closer to the edges, and a brighter, vivid red
which points towards a centre, noticeably absent inasmuch as it is struck through by a solid bar of the
lighter orange hue. Reinhardt‟s monochromatic932 canvas is cleverly constructed to effect through the
containment of the work a self-referential stability without sacrificing the dynamism which keeps the eye
unsettled, rendering the work aesthetically interesting. In this sense, the painting works transumptively to
indicate poiesis itself: it provides a unifying locus, while simultaneously engendering a radical dislocation
– a distribution between sense and concept which, finally, is atopian.
The vestiges of abstract expressionism are still clearly evident in the strong and frequent horizontal
strokes of Number 107, the lighter whites affirming not only the remnants of Reinhardt‟s concern with
gesture, but also the dominance of spatiality and depth in much early abstract art. In Abstract Painting
(Red) these have given way to far stricter geometry, a regularization of frequency and movement. Thus
927
Strickland, Minimalism, 45.
Ibid.
929
The reduction of referential elements – both within the composition and in the title chosen for minimalist works –
is a significant concern for many artists, composers and writers alike, and reflects the tendency of the minimalist
aesthetic away from complication and towards simplicity and facticity.
930
Ad Reinhardt, Number 107, 1950. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
931
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (Red), 1952. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
932
It should be recalled that the term monochrome can be used to designate single or multiple shades of a particular
colour.
928
183
Reinhardt explores a subtler and more austere understanding of space and time: these are intrinsic
quantities, Real in themselves, and immanent to the work rather than revealed in terms of its specific
qualities. The exposition and containment of the Real as poietic force by means of formal and technical
minimalism, is intensified by Reinhardt‟s increasing production of black monochromes, Abstract Painting
(1957) (Figure 66)933 being exemplary amongst these.
Figure 64: Ad Reinhardt,
Number 107, 1950.
Figure 65: Ad Reinhardt,
Abstract Painting (Red), 1952.
Figure 66: Ad Reinhardt,
Abstract Painting, 1957.
The persistent lessness of Reinhardt‟s art is exemplified well in the black monochrome, Abstract Painting
(1957) in which the tonal variation is even finer, and the geometry more ambiguous, than in the earlier
monochromes, despite the work not sacrificing any of its regularity. A close examination of this work –
for although Reinhardt‟s painting has a certain immediacy, it also characteristically draws out perception
by its chromatic subtleties934 – reveals that its constituent rectangular bands run both horizontally and
vertically. A central vertical band – only hinted at in the bright red of Abstract Painting (Red) – emerges
clearly in Reinhardt‟s black work. With its top and bottom tucked behind the painting‟s darkest shade of
933
934
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1957. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Strickland, Minimalism, 48-9.
184
black, and its centre forcefully interrupted by a lighter band of a reddish hue, Reinhardt constructs a
masterful monochromatic weave which renders practically indistinguishable stasis and movement, nonillusionistic flatness and dimensional fluctuation. It is no longer clear that the grounds for such aesthetic
judgements can be deduced from a patient analysis of the work in terms of either its formation or its
referential significance. Such minimalism935 readily relinquishes the currency which the artist historically
possesses. Should we wish to regard Reinhardt an abstract expressionist,936 his would be an expressionism
which buries the traditional mediation of genius by a coordination of inspiration, intention, gesture and
effect, and moves to subject such expressionistic techniques as the brush stroke, sculptural or musical
texture, to a stringent containment of its parts and processes.
Despite pushing our understanding of colour, pictorial illusion and the presentation of space significantly
towards a point of negation, Reinhardt‟s minimalism in fact pivots on the containment of all content,
space and even time. Moving towards an absence of tonal variation altogether, the later black works of
Reinhardt, as also of Brice Marden, reject all formal properties and relation in order to commit to a
tireless approach to the Real – this, despite the protestation of the first of Reinhardt‟s six noes. At the
heart of this “most austere reductivism imaginable”937 returns sublime presence – a now which
“dismantles consciousness,”938 in Lyotard‟s estimation, exhibiting that the “art object no longer bends
itself to models, but tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable.”939 Our task, henceforth, is one
of discovering the means by which minimalist negation and containment are able to pursue their sublime
vocation of heightening our access to the persistence of the Real.
b) Negation, sublation and lessness
As regards the numerous possible aesthetic techniques of negation, Barrett Watten‟s account proves
particularly instructive:
935
It should be noted that there are those minimalists, painter Agnes Martin amongst them, who retain a view of
inspiration (and hence the mediatory role of the artist) somewhere between the theories of Greco-Roman classicism
and the tradition of the romantic: “I don‟t have any ideas myself. I have a vacant mind, in order to do exactly what
the inspiration calls for. And I don‟t start to paint until after I have an inspiration…Every new thing in the world is
common upon by inspiration” (Agnes Martin, Interview (with Chuck Smith and Soyo Kuwayama), Nov. 1997.
http://vimeo.com/7127385. 20 November 2011).
936
Rose, ABC, 286.
937
Strickland, Minimalism, 44.
938
Lyotard, Sublime and Avant-Garde, 90.
939
Ibid., 101.
185
negativity is common to a range of concepts that include non-identity, antagonism, nihilism, revolt,
defamiliarization, rupture, opposition, dissociation, conflict, delusion, void, emptiness. Negativity as it
occurs „in the field‟ so to speak, with the radical forms and interventions of the avant-garde, partakes of one
or all of these modes – even as its final horizon, a denial of positivity, locates each instance as a potential of
critique.940
It is certainly possible to match a considerable number of minimalist works to each of these negative
concepts or procedures. If monochromaticism is most obviously associable with radical notions of “nonidentity...nihilism...dissociation...void, emptiness,” there are also works within the ambit of minimalism
and post-minimalism which expose negation in a more assertive light. Bruce Nauman – whose
endeavours span the numerous media of visual and conceptual art – habitually draws us back to the
violent tension between resistance and injunction indicated by the word “no.” This is nowhere more
forcefully exhibited than in his Clown Torture series.941 These are thoroughly disturbing works –
variously combining projections and stacked colour monitors, each with a separate soundtrack which,
together, produce through their highly obstructive sonic interaction an effect as startling as it is
discomfiting.942 These explore the tragi-comic figure of the clown in various of its visual, historical and
allegorical manifestations. Hyperbolic mannerisms and obsessively repeated words, phrases and catches
of narrative are ceaselessly looped to effect a “poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and
failure.”943 These works are allied to the best Beckettian tradition of negation and failure as
accomplishment. In fact, I believe it is no exaggeration to suggest that Nauman‟s work intensifies and
condenses Beckett‟s already highly minimalist vision by instantiating literary sonic occurrences of
considerable immediacy; maxims for unremitting existential repetition, one might say. In relation to
Beckett‟s writing, we are witnesses to existence in the sense that we come to recognize in the
disintegration of conventional narrative language the birth of a new language, more faithful to the lacuna
940
Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown: Wesleyan UP,
2003), 240.
941
Nauman‟s Clown Torture Series (Bruce Nauman, Clown Torture Series, 1987) is installed in various locations,
including the Art Institute of Chicago.
See http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/146989. The startling effect of Nauman‟s work is presented well by
the excellent auditory map of the Raw Materials exhibition of 2005 made available on the Tate Modern website:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/nauman/default.shtm (Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials. 12 October 20042 May 2005. Tate Modern, London).
942
Art
Institute
of
Chicago.
Notes.
Clown
Torture
Series,
Art
Institute
of
Chicago.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/146989.
943
Ibid.
186
at the centre of experience.944 We must pass right through this process of negation in order to arrive
within the austere poietic positivity which characterizes Beckett‟s oeuvre.945
By contrast, Nauman confronts us with aesthetic work from which we either recoil, or which draws us
into the position of voyeurs. In the Clown Torture works, in particular, we confront the most intimate
pathologies in a disturbing and fascinating public spectacle. In many of Nauman‟s video and sound
installations repetitions and loops of distinctly minimal material effect what is unquestionably a selfreferential poetics – the maddening self-prescription of Pete and Repeat/It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
(Track 18)946 is exemplary in this regard. Yet the more intensely self-referential Nauman‟s work becomes,
the more resistant it seems to interaction with the perceiver, and in this sense impresses itself upon us as
an object solely of voyeuristic consumption. Particularly remarkable amongst such pieces is No, No, New
Museum (Clown Torture Series) (Track 19/Figure 67/Clip 1).947 The work consists of looped footage of
two clowns in the traditional attire of the jester – head to head, for they appear on separate monitors, the
uppermost inverted. Each rehearses a stubborn and singular litany, generating from minimal means an
unsettling and asynchronous rhythmic counterpoint with only one word – no. This gesture of negation,
verbal as well as physical (they stamp and jump defiantly), exposes with traumatic immediacy the
questions of violence, cruelty, frustration, anger, absurdity, redundancy and resistance. Of more
immediate interest, is the manner in which the verbal act of negation – the articulation of “no” – in fact
resists elimination. To say no repeatedly effects neither the destruction of an active nihilism, which
Critchley describes in terms of an overcoming,948 nor does it amount to an irreversible progression
towards the void, to an absolute absence conceivable only in terms of pure destruction. Indeed, we cannot
know precisely what is being denied, resisted or refused in Nauman‟s No, No, New Museum, but we can
be certain that in the very act of this negation, “something is taking its course,” 949 to recall the phrase
which Beckett repeatedly employs in “Endgame” in pointing to the sheer facticity of finitude and the
passage of time in existence.
944
This is an adaptation of Agamben‟s remarkable formulation which, recognizing the incompletion of any act of
testimony (Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(New York: Zone, 2002), 33-4), suggests that language, “in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language
in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness” (ibid., 39).
945
According to Agamben, the witness is “a person who has lived through something who has experienced an event
from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it” (ibid., 17).
946
Bruce Nauman, Pete and Repeat/It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, 1987/2004.
947
Bruce Nauman, No No, New Museum, 1987. Private Collection.
948
Critchley, Very Little, 9.
949
Samuel Beckett, “Endgame,” The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1990) 98, 107. Hereafter CDW.
187
Figure 67: Bruce Nauman, No, No, New Museum, 1987.
Blanchot – arguably the writer closest in spirit to Beckett in terms of his thematic concern with the
confrontation between thought and the generative act; with the writer faced by nothingness, and the
encounter of the subject with death950 – captures this sense magnificently when he claims of art that “the
work...is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively that: that it is – and nothing
more. Outside of that, it is nothing. Anyone who tries to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it
expresses nothing.”951 Anything which the work potentially could mean is always lost to its contingency,
and so what is left in terms of the essence of the work is nothing but the facticity of the work itself – that
the work exists qua force rather than as an entity – and that this is the precondition for the taking-place of
any contingent situation upon which meaning or significance could be predicated.
950
27.
951
Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999),
Maurice Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude,” The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown: Station Hill,
1981), 64. Collection hereafter GO. Here the remark of Alain Robbe-Grillet, his estimation of the significance of
formalism, seems apposite: “[t]he existence of a work of art, and its weight are not at the mercy of an interpretative
screen which may or may not coincide with its contours. A work of art, like the world, is a living form: it is, it needs
no justification” (Robbe-Grillet, “Some Outdated Notions,” 71-2).
188
Here I believe it is possible to recognize an aesthetic outline of the ontological position which
Meillassoux adopts in relation to facticity. Facticity can no longer be simply understood in terms of the
existence of facts, for facts themselves cannot be adequately modelled in terms of knowledge of the
entities which exist in a given world.952 Nor can facticity be unravelled by necessary or contingent
correlation between thought and an entity.953 Both return us to an anthropocentric vision which fails to
acknowledge the essentially chaotic state of being qua being,954 mistaking events for moments of
transcendence,955 and points of origin for causes. Instead, facticity must be understood as the force of the
absolute itself: that which affirms that “[t]here is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness
of the given – nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or
persistence.”956 In this light, facticity refers to “the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything”957
which functions according to a principal of unreason – “that there is no reason for anything to be or to
remain the way it is.”958 Although to claim that minimalism actively pursues this factical logic would be
an exaggeration, it presents few intrinsic impediments to knowing the aesthetic entity such as it is. In its
most transparent examples, minimalism discovers a mediation of the contentless facticity of Blanchot‟s
vision of art, and Meillassoux‟s conviction that “it is the contingency of the entity that is necessary, not
the entity.”959
Art‟s persistence lies in the manner in which, even at its most nihilistic, it activates within itself a field of
resistance to the possibility of absolute negation. “[T]he writer will continue to remain dependent on the
very language that is to be dissolved,”960 writes Weller of Beckett‟s essentially constructive relation to
negation.961 It is tempting to recognize in this the echo of Hegelian determinate negation, according to
which every entity is determinate962 as the result of a process of differentiation and implicit negation:
952
AF, 53-4.
Ibid., 54.
954
Ibid., 64-5.
955
According to Meillassoux, philosophy stubbornly clings to “an unfathomable purpose underlying the origin of
our world. This reason has become unthinkable, but it has been preserved as unthinkable; sufficiently to justify the
value of its eventual unveiling in a transcendent revelation” (ibid., 63).
956
Ibid., 63.
957
Ibid., 62.
958
Ibid., 60.
959
Ibid., 65. In absolutizing facticity, Meillassoux does not “maintain that a determinate entity exists, but that it is
absolutely necessary that every entity might not exist” (ibid., 60).
960
Shane Weller, A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (London: Legenda, 2005), 59.
961
Similar remarks might be made of artists working with as diverse materials and media as do Reinhardt, Nauman,
Feldman and Blanchot (amongst many others).
962
“In order to exist, something must be determinate: of the completely undetermined it is impossible to say or to
know anything” (Franco Chieregin, “Freedom and Thought: Stoicism, Skepticism, and Unhappy Consciousness,”
The Blackwell Guide to Hegel‟s Phenomenology of Spirit,” ed. Ken R. Westphal (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 62).
953
189
“whatever individuates something distinguishes it from all others by contrast.”963 “The „different‟ is just
this,” Hegel tells us, “not to be in possession of itself, but to have its essential being only in an other.”964
The inside is affirmed not only through its opposition to an outside, however. “Spirit becomes object
because it is just this movement of becoming an other to itself.”965 What is negative in relation to a
determinate entity is also its innermost quality.
Recognized as confluent, intrinsic self-contradictoriness and extrinsic differentiation effect the dynamic,
positive calculation of the dialectic process Hegel identifies in terms of the negation of negation, or
sublation.966 “The fact that in the affirmation of something we must also comprehend its negation does
not constitute a contradiction that results in nothingness. It permits us to reach a higher content where
both the abstract affirmation of something and the necessary relation to that which negates it flow
together in unity.”967 In the dialectic emergence of a determinate entity, the contraries968 which inhabit
any identity are simultaneously preserved and abolished; modified through their interaction, “render[ing]
them no longer contraries, and therefore no longer self-contradictory in virtue of their reciprocal
containment.”969 If Hegelian dialectics970 always involve finite entities predicated on a series of negative
relations, then there can be no stable, independent, unmediated ground upon which such entities can be
forwarded other than these relations of negation themselves. This appears to legitimise the otherwise
counter-intuitive claim that “absolutely nothing may thus be found at the level of finite
determinations.”971
Yet, while it may be possible to agree with the proposition that the knowledge of identity takes shape
through a structurally negative process, this process should not be mistaken for identity itself. Badiou
explains that for the Hegelian argument to hold, any determinate entity necessarily witnesses “[t]he
passage from the pure limit…to the frontier…[which] forms the resource of an infinity directly required
963
Ibid.
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 124.
965
Ibid., 21
966
Michael Forster, “Hegel‟s Dialectical Method,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 132.
967
Chieregin, “Freedom,” 62.
968
“If the many determinate properties were strictly indifferent to one another, if they were simply and solely selfrelated, they would not be determinate; for they are only determinate in so far as they differentiate themselves from
one another, and relate to themselves to others as to their opposite.” Hegel, Phenomenology, 69. See also Forster‟s
description of the general structure of the Hegelian dialectic (Forster, “Hegel‟s Dialectical Method,” 132-3).
969
Ibid., 133.
970
Not coincidentally, Hegel traces his dialectical method through the scepticism of Plato‟s Parmenides (Chieregin,
“Freedom,” 62).
971
Ibid.
964
190
by the point of being.”972 In the face of “absolutely nothing,” the pure negative relation of being,
something rather than nothing marks a pure limit, a stable and determinate One. 973 Nonetheless, we
cannot ignore that any apparently stable limit exists simultaneously as a dynamic frontier of relations and
negations.974 From within this alternation of limit and frontier, Badiou claims that for Hegel “the point of
being, since it is always intrinsically discernible, generates out of itself the operator of infinity…Infinity
becomes an internal reason of the finite itself, a simple attribute of experience in general.”975 Norris
argues convincingly that this decision stems from Hegel‟s suppression of the relation between
mathematics and concept.976 Quantitative, bad infinity (a mindless law of quantitative repetition977) is
opposed to qualitative, good infinity – the infinity necessarily at work in the passage from limit to
frontier, in any process which ends in determinate negation. Sublation, in this light, is the predication
“that would finally transform the bad into the good, or the quantitative into the qualitative mode of
infinity.”978 In accordance with this understanding, the repetition of negation which we evidenced above
in Nauman‟s work, for instance, presents the shift from an accumulative negation, which might indeed
imply destruction or elimination, to the negation which marks good infinity – the sublation involved in
the mere facticity of repeatedly saying no.
Yet the quantitative question is not so easily suppressed in favour of the qualitative: “Hegel‟s notion of
the „good‟ infinity not only bears a curiously close resemblance to the „bad‟, but also counts as „good‟ on
his own submission…[simply because] it remains within the compass of the dialectical schema.” 979
Accepted as the predetermined theoretical target, the mechanisms which support sublation are
strategically elevated above those which render it problematic. Minimalism in this light might historically
have been delineated in terms of nihilism, and limited to effecting tropes of various structures of
sublation. As it happens, it is the irreducibly positive aspect of form which most influences the minimalist
aesthetic, yet this should not distract us entirely from the fact that sublation, as constructive negation, is
crucial to understanding several of the characteristic structural and semantic austerities of aesthetic
minimalism.
972
BE, 162.
It is of less immediate significance whether or not this unity is interpreted as a transcendental One or the product
of an ontological calculation, the count-as-One.
974
Ibid., 163.
975
Ibid.
976
Norris, Badiou, 144-5.
977
Ibid., 146-7.
978
Ibid., 147.
979
Ibid., 146.
973
191
In minimalist literature, negation is as often related to structure as it is to content (insofar as these can be
separated in the first place). In Joan Didion‟s Play It As It Lays, for instance, the novel‟s numerous events
are legitimately interesting taken individually. Yet, finally they dissolve into an increasingly featureless
continuum, itself reflective of the growing vacuity of its principal character, Maria Wyeth, when viewed
as part of the quasi-epic journey undertaken by her ceaselessly driving the highways of California.
Similarly, the plethora of descriptive information offered by the fictions of Raymond Carver and Alain
Robbe-Grillet – the former most often in terse, clipped dialogue;980 the latter in exhaustive description –
seldom feed into the standard principles of narrative organization. For Robbe-Grillet the mimetic
accuracy of his painstakingly detailed physical descriptions of objects and actions are separated decisively
from the usual teleological thrust and linearity of prose fiction.981 In the opening of The Voyeur, for
example, numerous phrases derived from the sensory perception of the central character, Mathias, are
repeated in fragments – gradually adapted and asymmetrically looped,982 shifting between various real
and imagined scenarios,983 negating, even as it traverses, the temporal course and linear expectations
conventional to narrative. Even so, we do not encounter a chaotic maximalism, but a distinctively literary
minimalism: a lean plot presented obliquely in a prose stripped of any affective excess, but replete with
vivid, descriptive detail of objects and their material contexts, and rapid shifts in perspective.984
Such minimalist techniques985 condition the oblique presentation of the murder at the centre of the novel,
to which we might append Robbe-Grillet‟s significant and self-conscious description of narrative
objectivity as constructed from “exact but false memories.”986 The tissue of such minimalist objectivism
980
A clear example of Carver‟s dialogical minimalism is demonstrated in the short story, Popular Mechanics, in
which the breakdown of a relationship is concretized within the aggressive but minimal exchange of a couple
regarding their child. What is at first only a rhetorical struggle soon manifests in a shockingly real manner, as the
couple begin physically to pull their child between them (Raymond Carver, “Popular Mechanics,” Stories, 262-3).
981
Of his own novels, Robbe-Grillet suggests that “the movement in the writing is more important in them than that
of emotions and [plot]” (Robbe-Grillet, “Some Outdated Notions,” 64). The genre is not bound, in other words, by
the conventional ways of marking narrative telos, although this does not imply that the works are without action and
plot (ibid., 64, 72-3), or significance – “[t]herein lies the difficulty...of creation: the work must convince people that
it is necessary, but not necessary for anything” (ibid., 73). This resembles the Kantian proposition of “a
purposiveness without a purpose” (Kant, Judgment, 65) exemplified by those situations and objects which appear to
derive from an intentional act, yet for which no intension, or agent of this intension, is identifiable.
982
Compare, for example, the variations of the phrases “it is raining/rainy day” and “very dark” (Alain RobbeGrillet, The Voyeur, trans. Richard Howard (London: John Calder, 1958), 10-4); and the recurrent image of the
rusted, and apparently inadequate, mooring rings (ibid., 10, 27).
983
Ibid., 28-9.
984
This has analogies with the often rapid and dramatic harmonic modulations which characterize Philip Glass‟ later
music, developing the originally cerebral, static and rather strict early compositions (Mertens, American Minimal
Music, 15; Strickland, Minimalism, 217, 239, 288; Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 311-3, 327, 335).
985
Warren Motte offers a useful account of Robbe-Grillet as a proto-minimalist (Motte, Small Worlds, 27).
986
Robbe-Grillet, Voyeur, 17.
192
is composed of signifiers progressively emptied of their symbolic content – a literary tradition which
might be traced through the work of the Futurists and Cubists, through the phonemic poetry of
Khlebnikov as much as through Stein‟s emphasis on the sufficiency of the written thing, the “nouns
[which] are the name of anything”987 which, as unavoidable as they are uninteresting,988 compel us
towards the distinctly minimalist vision of aesthetic composition in which “[b]eginning again and again is
a natural thing.”989
The narrating voices of Beckett‟s oeuvre, forever in self-reflective doubt of their own efficacy,990
habitually manifest an alternate vision of sublation in the face of negativity. A near symmetry is
maintained between proposition and negation in the recognition that “something is taking its course,” 991
yet finally it is towards a compound negation that art tends – that which we might term a minimal
sublation, or the minimal positive element of a diminishing art object. It is this sense which lies behind
the repeated succession in “Ill Seen Ill Said” of the neutral phrase, “neither more nor less” by the
imperative, “Less!”992 Beckett‟s fatigued but unwavering search for existential lessness993 effects an
intense minimalism in which radically reductive strategies at once contain and distend the media through
which the aesthetic work is instantiated, and, in some cases, even transume the work from one medium to
another.994 Beckett delineates an ideal minimalism in terms of the pursuit of “[l]ess. Ah the sweet one
word. Less. It is less. The same but less.”995
The “[s]ilence at the eye of the scream”996 – the disappearance of the voice which marks the
incomprehensible moment of our own organic finitude – is countered by vocality as an affirmation of
existence, for “once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life.” 997 Here it is
profitable to touch on Agamben‟s conception of Voice998 as that which is most intimate to humanity
987
Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909 -1945, ed.
Patricia Meyerowitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 139.
988
Ibid., 126-7; 137.
989
Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” Look at Me Now, 23.
990
Samuel Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” CSP, 116.
991
Beckett, “Endgame,” 98, 107.
992
Samuel Beckett, “Ill Seen Ill Said,” Nohow On (New York: Grove, 1996), 80, 84-5.
993
This is the title of a short prose work of 1970 (Samuel Beckett, “Lessness,” CSP, 197-201).
994
In “Quad,” for example, a literary text is in an important sense distributed between the capturing technology of
the camera, the movement and colour which is captured, and its recombination in the televised visual image.
995
Beckett, “Ill Seen,” 81.
996
Ibid., 64.
997
Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” 116.
998
Agamben‟s conceptualization of Voice is elaborated below.
193
precisely because it marks the distinction of utterance from meaning, 999 but moreover in the manner it
calls us beyond itself, to “thinking language as such”1000 beyond the “scission of voice and word.”1001 In
this space, where the Voice falls silent, existence as it is presented in language confronts death. Only
when we are able to dwell in pure language,1002 beyond any reference to time or persistence, do we move
beyond the radical trauma of being thrown into Being,1003and beyond the condemnation of existence to a
passive persistence stripped of activity and its valences with the infinite.
In this light, to go on1004 might be understood in terms of an ateleological persistence, a compulsion even
within an atopian existential situation which excites no valences – “neither here nor there where all the
footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away.” 1005 Although we
can agree that it is more of the same which concerns Beckett, it is all too easy to neglect the sublative
more with which Beckett clearly is concerned when he writes of the narrator‟s footfalls in “Heard in the
Dark I,” that “many more will be necessary. Many many more.”1006 Indeed, the question of physical
footfalls – the repeated pacing backwards and forwards of the character May – shapes Beckett‟s
eponymous play.1007 This remains one of his most significant statements regarding the predicative
character of repeated and cyclical movement, both physical and formal. It is thus that “the motion alone is
not enough, I must hear the feet however faint they fall.”1008 The impetus provides “clearly audible
rhythmic tread,”1009 is increasingly subject to pauses as the work progresses, attempting to “dramatize
deterioration with visual and aural diminuendo.”1010 Yet even the thought of negation reinstates a minimal
requisite intensity of existence, as demonstrated by the tentative persistence of the work‟s closing: “Will
you never have done? [Pause.] Will you never have done...revolving it all? [Pause.] It? [Pause.] It all.
[Pause.] In your poor mind. [Pause.] It all.”1011
999
Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt
(Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1991), 95. Hereafter LD.
1000
Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben, (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 21.
1001
Ibid.
1002
“To exist in language without being called there by any Voice, simply to die without being called by death, is,
perhaps the most abysmal experience; but this is precisely, for man, also his most habitual experience” (LD, 96).
1003
LD, 56.
1004
This phrase is employed most famously by Beckett as the motif from which the closing sequence of The
Unnamable is composed (Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable,” The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979), 381-2).
1005
Samuel Beckett, “For to end,” 246.
1006
Samuel Beckett, “Heard in the Dark I,” Complete Short Prose, 147.
1007
Samuel Beckett, “Footfalls,” CDW, 397-403.
1008
Ibid., 401.
1009
Beckett, “Footfalls,” 399.
1010
Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 201.
1011
Beckett, “Footfalls,” 403.
194
In Beckett‟s “Quad,”1012 a formal symmetry between appearance and disappearance marks a minimally
positive account of negation. The structure of the work unfolds with the movement of its four players,
who appear one by one, differentiated by the primary colours of the robes they wear, and mirroring one
another in symmetrical movements which bisect and triangulate various possible courses from corner to
corner of the square space within which the action of the play is contained. Approaching the centre of the
square, they take a small circular, clockwise deviation, both to avoid collision as their paths cross one
another, and also to mark symbolically an inarticulable void at the centre of the aesthetic work, which can
only be indicated obliquely. Thus, both in concept and in form, a positive element continues to be derived
from negativity.
Comparable models of formal sublation are evident in minimalist music and visual art. In terms of the
former, Steve Reich‟s compositions which take shape through the cyclical phasing of melodic material
present excellent examples. Separate sound sources, initially synchronized and which present identical
melodic material, are gradually moved out of phase with one another. During this process, each source
negates the initial integrity of the other, while simultaneously bringing about new, albeit contingent,
melodic singularities. The process is cyclical, and the composition eventually returns to its initial state so
that, much like a Beckettian narrative, we might say that despite the considerable number of discrete
states which are discernible in the work, these remain part of an ateleological distension of its basic
material. The aesthetic means by which we encounter the subtle, minimalist survival of negation extends
into the sculptural realm in works such as Carl Andre‟s Cedar Piece (Figure 68),1013 which is constructed
of identical wooden units, “laid on top of one another on the floor,”1014 “as if to stress that there is no
hierarchy of position or relationship among the parts of his sculpture.”1015 Andre‟s emphasis is on the
physicality of his material,1016 emphasized by the “repetition of modular units”1017 and declining a
transcendental understanding of sculptural space.1018 The negotiation of positive and negative space in this
work – the tension which exists between the X formed on every side of the piece, the receding space
towards its central axis and the large concave oval at its corners – must therefore be viewed in its most
literal light as a rehearsal at its most elementary level of the emergence of art from space, of the
subtraction of form from formlessness.
1012
Samuel Beckett, “Quad,” CDW, 449-54.
Carl Andre, Cedar Piece, 1964. Oeffetliche Kunstammlung, Basel.
1014
Meyer, Minimalism, 111.
1015
Baker, Minimalism, 42.
1016
Meyer, Minimalism, 127.
1017
Ibid., 111.
1018
Ibid.
1013
195
Figure 68: Carl Andre, Cedar Piece. 1959, reconstructed 1964.
If many of minimalism‟s most significant works call us to trace the positive passage from what is
“absolutely negative” in negation to the subtractive element of negation – marking the most essential part
of an aesthetic entity‟s emergence – others explore more directly the relation between aesthetics and
destruction. With Splashing (Figure 69),1019 Richard Serra turns minimalism towards that which is
“chemically elemental,”1020 using molten lead, “synonymous with weight,”1021 and hurling it at the
intersection of various walls and floors. Such effort defines a minimalism which stages the meeting of the
expressionistic gesture of the artist, the urban environment, matter at its most brutal, and natural forces
such as gravity, Newton‟s third law (action-reaction) and the rate and manner of the solidification of
liquid metals.1022
1019
Richard Serra, Splashing, 1968. Temporary work.
Baker, Minimalism, 112.
1021
Ibid.
1022
Marzona, Minimal Art, 86.
1020
196
Figure 69: Richard Serra, Splashing, 1968.
The effort of the artist unquestionably requires a certain physical force – much as is the case with the acid
action painting of Gustav Metzger – and critics have recognized in Serra‟s work something “inherently
more kinetic and menacing”1023 than earlier minimalism. Chave goes so far as to suggest that “it is more
often the case with Serra...that his work doesn‟t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it
out.”1024 A similarly extreme sense of negation is apparent in some concrete poetry: parts of Hanjörg
Mayer‟s “fortführungen” (Figure 70)1025 present lines so densely overlaid that all sense is destroyed
except the bare facticity that it is some form of typescript; Gappmayr 1026 goes further still, almost entirely
1023
Strickland, Minimalism, 290.
Chave, Minimalism and Rhetoric, 36. Chave‟s reference is to Serra‟s massive and often perilously balanced lead
sheets and steel stacks, some of which are part of his ominously titled Skullcracker series of sculptures. The
installation of Serra‟s sculptures has caused several injuries and even a death (Ibid., 35; Strickland, Minimalism,
290). In Strickland‟s estimation, this perilous art connects it to a minimalist tradition of the sublime traceable to
Barnett Newman (ibid., 270, 291). However, we should emphasize, with Kant, that if the feeling of the sublime
arises from a “momentary inhabitation of the vital forces” (Kant, Judgment, 98) it is affirmed when this is “followed
immediately by an outpouring of [these vital forces]…that is all the stronger,” (ibid.) which cannot be the case if
danger spills into destruction, as has occurred in the case of Serra.
1025
Hansjörg Mayer, From “fortführungen,” ACP, 202.
1026
We might recall the similar work, ver, cited above.
1024
197
negating text by superimposing a large black block over his writing, from behind which only the most
minute marks are visible (Figure 71).1027
Figure 70: Hansjörg Mayer, from fortführungen, 1964.
Figure 71: Heinz Gappmayr, Untitled, 1964.
c) Taking-place
In the face of such extremes, it is necessary to recognize that despite any sublative (hence structurally
negative) process through which identity emerges, that identity itself, in its taking-place, is fundamentally
positive. No matter how minimal the distinction between self-affirmation and auto-erasure, it is only sheer
destruction which negates the banal, existential positivity that “something is taking its course,”1028 to
recall Beckett.
Giorgio Agamben offers an intriguing account of how the teaching of the thirteenth century theologian,
Amalric of Bena, reclaims transcendence – indeed, the infinite – from within the very taking-place of
existence, despite the almost overwhelming pull of existential situations towards limitation, finitude or
even annihilation. According to this doctrine (subsequently declared heretical), it is in the most intimate
moment of the present tense that we encounter infinite perfection: “The transcendent…is not a supreme
entity above all things; rather, the pure transcendent is the taking-place of every thing.”1029 Accordingly,
1027
Heinz Gappmayr, “untitled,” The Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism, ed. Eugene Wildman (Chicago:
Swallow, 1967), 39. Anthology hereafter CRAC.
1028
Beckett, “Endgame,” 98, 107.
1029
CC, 14-5.
198
what is good “is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority,” while what is evil is “the
reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like others.”1030 What is radically positive is that which
habitually is overlooked – the facticity of existence; that entities exist. Meillassoux, to recall, grants a
similar privilege to facticity, albeit from the perspective of post-naïve realism, as opposed to the
pantheistic transcendentalism Agamben recognizes in Amalric‟s thought. The most intrinsic part of an
entity is its persistence – its taking-place as a contingent quantity across a period of time within and as the
Real. It is the facticity of persistence which renders existence always positively charged – potential, yet
immanent.
The coincidence of the Real with the proposition offered by Agamben in terms of transcendental
immanence/immanent transcendence – that which is “not somewhere else…[but rather] the point at
which…[entities] grasp the taking-place proper to them, at which they touch their own non-transcendent
matter”1031 – emphasizes that being in itself is decisively prior to any specific relation of being. Entities
which exist return to themselves qua existence, and it is in their being just as they are that they participate
in the pure multiplicity of being without themselves being pure multiples (Badiou would call such entities
examples of a multiple-one).
Is it possible to suggest that in its taking-place an entity counts itself as one? Through the generation of
aesthetic objects which testify to the taking-place of the Real, minimalism exemplifies that which is
immanent, and which is prior to any relation – of meaning, effect, or significance. Minimalism offers a
tabula rasa on which nonrelational and independent aesthetic entities come unto themselves – the
transumption of an entity from its material topos to its poietic atopos. In this way the radical material of a
quantitative ontology is established apart from quality as such, while still acting as ground for the
emergence of the same. Qualities emerge and are incorporated into elaborate, meaningful sequences on
the basis of the Real, which, in turn, is informed by a quantitative understanding of Being.
The taking-place of quantity, so central to minimalism, presses us into the problematic aesthetic region
where the difference between conceptual and actual negation is easily missed. Should the negative shape
which accompanies the process of identification become indiscernible from the threat of the actual
annihilation of an entity, then the price which such a practice demands from us is undoubtedly too high.
Aesthetic minimalism frequently traces the extreme boundaries of this distinction, pressing us towards the
1030
1031
Ibid., 15.
Ibid.
199
often uncomfortable proximity of pure quantity and pure destruction. It summons us to vigilance: to an
awareness of the simplicity of taking-place, to the facticity of an entity‟s persistence, and to an
unambiguous positivity at the heart of that which is Real. Regardless of whether we aspire to minimum
through a process of progressive abstraction and simplification, or regard minimum as integral ground
upon which an entity might be defined, minimalism reflects a concern with this parsimonious facticity. If
the distinction between existence and inexistence is minimal, it is nonetheless paramount.
This is an essential characteristic of Samuel Beckett‟s work. He presses the difficult interaction of
structural negation and destructive negation in a direction quite distinct from Hegelian sublation, towards
the transcendental change central to the negativity of Schopenhauer‟s philosophy. This, Weller notes, is
the moment “in which the very distinction between subject and object is overcome” 1032 through a real
abolition which exposes a “nothing other than nothing” 1033 which can be mediated positively only by a
type of ecstatic or rapturous quasi-transcendence.1034 Importantly, such quasi-transcendence does not
actually leave the field of Being in relation to which it gestures its transcendence. Much as in the case of
Amalric‟s taking-place, transcendence is immanent to existence. For Beckett, writing describes the
theatre of thought. Thought, in its turn, is both our point of access and final barrier to the stuff of
existence. As is well acknowledged, Beckett is particularly concerned with the most minimal intensities
of existence: the moment of death, and those situations in which death seems imminent, but in which we
persist nonetheless. These are moments of extraordinary self-reflexivity. Yet it would be an error to
regard Beckett‟s work as conventionally metafictional. He is not writing about writing, or even directly
about the creative process, although much might be implicit in this regard. Beckett writes about thought,
or more specifically he writes about thinking about thought. More accurately still, Beckett, at his best, is
writing about thinking about the intense struggle between thought and the absence of thought as
analogues for Being and non-Being. Language and its mediation through the voice and writing might be
our most obvious points of access to this struggle, but they are not necessarily our most immediate, hence
the significance of physical movement, theatrical staging and the mediation of the voice by sound
recording and radio, and of the body and its movement by television and film.
As Meillassoux astutely notes, the phenomenological assertion that it is impossible to gain knowledge of
the intrinsic nature of Being is predicated on the assumption that Being is inextricable from thought:1035
1032
Weller, Taste for Negative, 82.
Ibid., 83.
1034
Ibid.
1035
AF, 5.
1033
200
the dogma that “[w]e cannot represent the „in itself‟ without it becoming „for us.‟”1036 For the most part,
Beckett‟s work offers a significant radicalization of this relation between Being and thought, but remains
subdued by its own phenomenology insofar as it refuses or fails to disengage from thought. Yet
occasionally, and only momentarily, we encounter in this remarkable writing a poietic intuition of the
Real: the work acts as the minimal place-keeper of that which is independent of either thought or
existence. At this point art assumes the responsibility of presenting generic being, which is to say, of
presenting the force of generation itself as the singular point entirely exterior to existence. This is the
mode of generic being which Beckett gestures towards in terms of death, and which Agamben refers to as
whatever being, “what is most difficult to think: the absolutely non-thing experience of a pure
exteriority.”1037 For Beckett, although writing is itself a gesture subject to the weakness and transience of
its own inscription of Being, and one that cannot ordinarily effect the fantasies of exteriority that it
reports, it nonetheless traces the severe limitations of its powers with such patience and persistence that it
becomes a strange source of consolation. To be certain, Beckett understands well that it is not only
eminently possible, but necessary, for all living organisms to die. What writing witnesses is the struggle
of consciousness to render pure exteriority an object of knowledge by recognizing the minimal point at
which the entity expresses itself as a vanishing trace of its own existence.
The mere taking-place of the voice, language and writing, partner the persistence of the body and the
material world, and condition, however tentatively, the possibility of a recuperative gesture. Beckett‟s no
is thus not negative, so much as it is subtractive, to use the term central to Alain Badiou‟s thought. It is
vital here to recall the difference between Being and existence. The former, in Badiou‟s formulation, is a
field of pure multiplicity. Existence, the particularity of an entity or situation, is subtracted from being,
but without in any sense diminishing its multiplicity. Subtraction discerns something positive within
existence from that which, in every sense, is indifferent to either positivity or negation. Subtraction is thus
simultaneously negative and positive: the former insofar as it negates through existence the illusion that
multiplicity is a totality, and hence a particular quantity rather than quantity in-itself; the latter inasmuch
as that which is subtracted is indeed a positing and sustaining of new entities.
We might say that Beckett‟s work devotes itself to subtractive points of existential transition between
exteriority and interiority. At one point, subtraction problematizes the relation between minimum and
nothingness, as well as any possible representation of the instant of vanishing from existence. At another
1036
1037
Ibid., 4.
CC, 67.
201
point this transition is that at which an entity begins in its persistence within the Real, that is, enters into
the progressive temporal situation according to the contingent laws through which it coheres. In both
cases, this transition presents an attempt to come to grips with quantity, as a point of minimal negativity:
the least possible for existence to persist, and the least necessary for existence to persist.
We might say that minimalism persists insofar as it is complicit with the Real. While what is Real is
necessarily independent of any particular entity, and so also indifferent to the qualities of such entities, it
is not indifferent to the quantitative facticity of the taking-place of these entities themselves. This point is
perhaps clearest in the case of Hegelian dialectics, where saying no converts itself into the minimal
positive facticity of “something taking its course,”1038 to recall Beckett‟s existentially pointed phrase. As
we have seen, the manner in which structural negation recuperates positivity is well accounted for in the
Hegelian dialectic. The properly procedural element of taking-place – that act and facticity are confluent
in describing that something takes place – further pulls the positive from the flames of negation, and
seems also to attest to the re-ascendency of quantity in the consideration of Being.
Even in extreme cases of negation it is necessary to recall this residual procedural positivity. Beckett‟s
“Texts for Nothing” pursues pure absence relentlessly – “Is it possible, is that the possible thing at last,
the extinction of this black nothing and its impossible shades, the end of the farce of making and the
silencing of silence.”1039 As is often the case in Beckett‟s work, the human voice – “a voice murmuring a
trace,” the fading intensity yet stubborn persistence of consciousness1040 – mediates not only between
existence and non-existence (“extinction”), but also between being qua existence (entities) and being qua
being (pure multiplicity). If negation and the fantasy of its absolute predication in nothingness accentuate,
in the words of Levinas, the “weariness which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all a
weariness of oneself…the weariness concern[ing] existence itself,”1041 it also returns us to the procedural
aspect of our being.
Poiesis might manifest in consciousness as the “the farce of making,” 1042 but its ontological significance –
the production of novelty, perhaps even something out of nothing – retains a radical significance. Of this
existential pull between affirmation and negation, Beckett asks the following: “And whose the shame,
1038
Beckett, “Endgame,” 98, 107.
Samuel Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” 154.
1040
Ibid.
1041
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1988), 11.
Hereafter EE.
1042
Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” 154.
1039
202
having to say…so many times the same lie lyingly denied, whose the screaming silence of no‟s knife in
yes‟s wound, it wonders.”1043 In existence, if presence is always weakened by the apparently negative
structure of identification, that negation is itself the primary stuff of Being is cast into radical doubt by the
sheer presence of our quantitative being. There is no denying that this presence is weakened, indeed
injured, by the “same lie lyingly denied” – our stubborn denial of the fact that we remain unable to
articulate the moment of our disappearance – whether passive or active, violent or non-violent. The
impossibility of finitude, in a significant sense, conditions our possible responses to finitude.
10. THE TENSION OF NOTHINGNESS AND MINIMUM
a) Nihilism and an approach to minimum
There are many ways of saying no, and although such saying is itself existentially positive, this should not
lull us into the fantasy that its consequences cannot involve genuine destruction or elimination. Several of
these concerns play out in the various species of nihilism, “in its origin [as]…a failure to accept the world
as it is, resenting the fact that the world is devoid of a goal, unity or meaning,”1044 and discovering ways
“to endure the meaninglessness, the chaos of the world.”1045 For Simon Critchley the experience of
constitutive absence is permeated by an overwhelming sense of disappointment: political disillusionment
in the prospect of universal justice, and religious disenchantment provoked by the pervasive failure of
universal meaning or transcendental truth.1046 So entwined is nihilism with the emergence of
philosophical reason, that it is no exaggeration to see it as the implicit operator in the work of Socrates,
which places at the heart of the dialectic the pull between the consistency of existence and the desistance
of nothingness. Negativity is intimated equally in the immanence of Being – uncovered through both
formal and informal procedures of dubitation – as it is in the possibility of transcendence, which negates
the ordinary situation of being.
1043
Ibid.
Bülent Diken, Nihilism (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 15.
1045
Ibid.
1046
Critchley, Very Little, 2-3.
1044
203
Nihilism and the via negativa of apophatic theology often reveal deep concordances insofar as they are
plaited together in much scholastic thought. The summit of the latter is reached in the work of St. Thomas
Aquinas, which maintains that if the existence of God is in-itself unknowable to us, it is still possible to
affirm this existence – either through revelation, which positively circumvents the field of knowledge
entirely, or through oblique means, which are both a posteriori and structurally negative.1047 Aquinas
articulates the latter in terms of the quinque viae1048 – the five paths or arguments which he develops from
Aristotle in affirming the existence of God. He argues that knowledge is conditioned on the limits
presented by material existence, and that it is therefore impossible to grasp the essence of God or to
deduce the relation between the transcendental and immanent (material) from the vertiginous absence of
knowledge regarding this divine essence. Rather, we are obliged to begin any such inquiry into the
existence of God immersed in the field of effects themselves and, through negative interrogation,
patiently to eliminate uncertainty. This constitutes a significant strategy in the apophatic or negative
theological tradition, influencing not only subsequent generations of theologians and philosophers, but
also those who engage more directly with nihilism.
It was the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi who first employed the term nihilism to oppose
what he saw in the transcendental idealism of his contemporaries1049 as a dangerous reduction of the
conceptual and the existential to a single field of absolute solipsism.1050As Critchley reports, “for Jacobi,
Fichtean idealism is nihilism…because it allows the existence of nothing outside or apart from the ego
and the ego is itself nothing but a product of the „free power of the imagination.‟”
1051
Jacobi, a man of
conservative faith, held that the philosophical systematicity of both idealism and atheism end in nihilism.
His (Jacobi‟s) opposition to nihilism is at least in part vindicated by the activity of the Russian nihilists of
the 1860s and 1870s. The transposition of nihilism from the sphere of metaphysics to the field of anarchic
and often violent political practice occurs in the context of social disillusionment and the failure of the
1047
Ralph McInerny, “Saint Thomas Aquinas,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/. 20 November 2011.
1048
The following are the five ways which Aquinas asserts prove the existence of God: the unmoved mover – “a first
cause of change not itself being changed by anything” (Thomas Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans.
Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 200); first agent cause (ibid., 200-01); necessity – “we are forced
to postulate something which of itself must be, owing this to nothing outside itself, but being itself the cause that
other things must be” (ibid., 201); degree of perfection – “there is something which causes…whatever…perfections
they have” (ibid.); teleology – “everything in nature is directed to its goal by someone with understanding” (ibid.,
202).
1049
Amongst them the late Enlightenment defenders of rationalism, Kant, Fichte and Schelling.
1050
George di Giovanni, “Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-jacobi/. 20 November 2011.
1051
Critchley, Very Little, 3-4.
204
systematic programme of idealist thought to instigate decisive change.1052 An essential field of conflict
becomes apparent between the nihilistic politico-aesthetic disposition of Chernyshevsky, the poetry of
Lermontov, and the novels of Turgenev1053 on the one hand, and what Dostoevksy, in an oppositional
mode apposite to that offered by Jacobi, decries as “the nihilisms or indifferentism of the Russian
educated classes…[in which] suicide is the only logical conclusion.”1054
The coordinates of Russian nihilism remain within the greater constellation marked axiomatically by
Jacobi in which one either opposes nihilism by affirming the existence of God, or embraces atheism,
annihilation and Nothingness.1055 It is Nietzsche – arguably the most penetrating modern thinker of the
relationship between nothingness, thought and being – who steps decisively beyond the field of mere
consolation or disappointment in relation to religion:
The new fundamental condition: our conclusive transitoriness. I – Formerly one sought the feeling of the
grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way…One therefore
now tries the opposite direction: the way mankind is going shall serve as proof of its grandeur and kinship
with God. Alas, this, too, is vain! At the end of this way stands the funeral urn of the last man and
gravedigger (with the inscription „nihil humani a me alienum puto‟[I judge nothing that is human as alien to
1056
me – the words of Roman playwright Terence]).
Insisting that religion is the cause of nihilism, rather than its antidote, Nietzsche moves decisively apart
from the prevailing social, political and theological thought of his time. Our principal task becomes one of
recognizing that “nihilism is a failure to accept the world as it is.”1057 Responding adequately to the
religious nihilism, which “posits some values superior to life and negates life in the name of those „higher
values‟, values that are a condition of all other values” requires a radical reconsideration of the
transcendental. “[T]he will for a moral interpretation or valuation of the word now appears to be a will to
untruth.”1058 Yet the drive to a horizon which “at last…seems to us again free, even it is not bright”1059 is
undiminished. If our highest values have been rendered inoperative – if “God is dead. God remains dead.
And we have killed him”1060 – we can in no sense legitimise a melancholic, inertial drifting in existence.
To the contrary, if what was mistaken for absolute truth is indeed a world in which fable has effective
1052
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 5-6.
1054
Critchley, Very Little, 5.
1055
Ibid., 4.
1056
Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, trans. R. J. Hollindale (Oxford: Penguin, 1977), 199.
1057
Diken, Nihilism, 15.
1058
Critchley, Very Little, 7.
1059
Nietzsche, Reader, 209.
1060
Ibid., 203.
1053
205
capacity,1061 we are enjoined to participate, to press towards the discovery of our “innate disposition to
seek in all things that which must be overcome in them.”1062
The central promise of Nietzsche‟s philosophical agenda resides in overcoming the destitution which
emerges when we capitulate to the destructive element of negation: that strictly void part of being which
cannot be presented as such except through annihilation. From a sustained resistance to a simplistic
understanding of value, meaning and truth it becomes possible to recuperate some of those pivotal
elements of thought itself. In the understanding of existence this engenders, the emphasis shifts from
stable Being to unstable becoming. “Nihilism,” Vattimo maintains, “is still developing.”1063 In this light
nihilism cannot be asserted plausibly as an accomplished task – either in historical or in metaphysical
terms – and it unceasingly obliges us to redefine our relation to it.1064 The accomplished nihilist is the one
for whom the challenge of discovering “new categories and new values that will permit us to endure the
world of becoming,”1065 is ongoing.
Both the existentialist and the hermeneutic heirs of the Nietzschean legacy see this clearly. The affinities
between the versions of nihilism offered by Nietzsche and Heidegger become unavoidable, according to
Vattimo, as soon as we accept that the transformation of value lies at the heart of any nihilist equation. 1066
Likewise, the work of Sartre or Levinas, only imaginable within the orbit of Nietzschean existentialism,
concerns itself with the transformatory potential of a consideration of nothingness1067 and nihilation.1068
Equally, the pervasive mood of postmodernism – doubt regarding the prospective predication of
universality by the paths opened by humanism1069 – cannot be comprehended merely as reactions against
the apparent failures of modernity, but must also be understood, so asserts Vattimo, as a positive field,
1061
Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. Jon R.
Snyder (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 24-7; Critchley, Very Little, 7.
1062
Nietzsche, Reader, 209.
1063
Vattimo, End, 19.
1064
Ibid., 19.
1065
Critchley, Very Little, 8
1066
“For Nietzsche the entire process of nihilism can be summarized by… „the devaluation of the highest values.‟
For Heidegger, Being is annihilated insofar as it is transformed completely into value...[F]or Heidegger, it seems
possible and desirable to go beyond nihilism, while for Nietzsche the accomplishment of nihilism is all that we
should wait and hope for” (Vattimo, End, 20) – recalling that accomplishment must be understood in terms of the
transformation of value, rather than destruction in its rawest form.
1067
Much of Levinas‟ early thought centres on an existential counterpoint with that part of being which in its raw
facticity is prior to any possible conceptualization, which he terms the il y a (there is).
1068
Sartre identifies the transition from that part of an entity which is in-itself to that part which is for-itself – the
dialectic movement between abstract metaphysics and a practical (existentialist) ontology – by asserting that a
process of (quasi-dialectic) nihilation occurs within what is in-itself.
1069
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge,
1988), 6-7.
206
inaugurated by Nietzsche. According to Vattimo, the particular project of Nietzschean nihilism
inaugurates the postmodern era.1070 However, this project also proves a problematic proposition, since it
advocates the view that nihilism is something to be overcome, drawing it back into constructive discourse
and preventing its delivering up the nothing it seems to promise.
The task of defining nihilism is intimately bound to the transformation rather than the destitution of value:
a trans-valuation. “[N]ihilism is the consumption of use-value in exchange-value,”1071 suggests Vattimo.
Such situations of existence are increasingly decoupled from either transcendence or telos, feeding into a
dystopian Marxism in which we experience a “generalized reification…the reduction of everything to
exchange-value,”1072 and what remains in circulation is the force of forcing without any real direction, or
the energy of instruments without any real instrumentality. “Nihilism does not mean that Being is in the
power of the subject,”1073 as many, including Jacobi and the Russian nihilists, insist. “[R]ather it means
that Being is completely dissolved in the discoursing of value, in the indefinite transformations of
universal equivalence.”1074 Nihil or nothingness – doubtless the most slippery of all concepts – requires of
us a patient discernment of the most plausible amongst a series of possible responses. Critchley identifies
five possible responses. The first is a refusal of nihilism, reaffirming an essentially naive, even religious,
metaphysics,1075 while the second is an indifference to nihilism, which habitually resolves itself in an
annoying agnostic cheerfulness.1076 Perhaps most pervasive in the contemporary west, is a passive
nihilism which accepts the diagnosis of meaninglessness and makes no great effort to reconstitute these
conditions.1077 By contrast, active nihilism embraces “a violent force of destruction…which imagines
itself as the propaedeutic to a revolution of everyday life.”1078 Finally, Critchley believes it is possible to
delineate nihilism – a delineation which rests on a broadly deconstructive approach that “keep[s] open the
slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be…Hope against hope.
Austere messianism. Very little.”1079
1070
Vattimo, End, 164.
Vattimo, End,. 22.
1072
Ibid., 26.
1073
Ibid., 22
1074
Ibid.
1075
Critchley, Very Little, 10-11.
1076
Ibid.,11.
1077
Ibid.
1078
Ibid.
1079
Ibid., 24; See ibid., 11-12 where the problem of delineating nihilism is stated; and ibid., 13-24 for Critchley‟s
exposition of the philosophical nuances involved here.
1071
207
b) Nothingness and existence
Rescuing nothingness from nihilism is an activity which affirms that the least which is possible –
minimum – remains a positive phenomenon. Accomplishing this extraction requires the reiteration,
following Badiou, of a central ontological position of the present work: Being itself is explicable only in
terms of pure multiplicity, and is non-identical to existence.1080 The latter arises within pure multiplicity,
is itself composed of multiples, but does not eliminate multiplicity. We might clarify the existential field
by schematizing it according to the three principal ways it is given within a general situation of Being:
existence – the positive arising or appearance of entities; inexistence – the disappearance of entities;
nonexistence – the non-appearance of entities. The last is necessarily difficult to grasp, as it attempts to
approximate non-Being from the perspective of Being, or, stated otherwise, to represent the situation in
which the very potential that an entity could emerge is entirely impossible. Returning in this light to the
distinction between existence and Being, it becomes clearer that pure ontological nothingness can be
admitted, even as an impossibility, only if we capitulate to that most totalizing and religious of all
dogmas: that the One is. For, if pure nothingness is synonymous with non-existence, then it belongs to
pure multiplicity, which is something;1081 but if it participates neither in existence nor in Being, then as
non-Being, it has no part in multiplicity. In this light, it is necessary to dispense with non-existence as a
possible key to comprehending nothingness, for this would effectively revive the apophatic dogma that
God is Nothingness.1082
The absence of a simple equation between nothingness and non-existence returns us to the patient, if often
paradoxical, interrogation conducted within the ambit of existentialism. Here the tension between
existence and non-existence is habitually at its greatest. In this regard, we might recall firstly that, for
Heidegger, nothingness cannot be despatched by any metaphysics. In fact, nothingness proves to be the
proper subject of a metaphysics freed from precisely such an ontotheological limitation of Being as
mentioned above, which Heidegger‟s project sets itself to dismantle.1083 In so doing, he recentres the
1080
Alain Badiou, “Existence and Death,” trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Discourse 24.1 (2002): 68.
Recalling that existence is in every instance a contingent stabilization of the multiplicity of pure Being.
1082
This would obliterate even the possibility of a model of causation not derived finally from an absolute assertion
of the force of divine will.
1083
Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” Basic Writings: Nine Essays, plus, the Introduction of Being and
Time,” ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978), 108; Abraham Stone, “Heidegger and Carnap
on the Overcoming of Metaphysics,” Martin Heidegger, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Aldershot and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2006), 222; 239.
1081
208
question of nothingness in a manner which remains stubbornly unsatisfied by any recourse to the familiar
dialectic formula of Hegelian thought, that “becoming is the transition between being and
nothingness.”1084 Neither does Heidegger accept that nothingness can be rendered impotent by the manner
in which it is rejected by science – which refuses it on the basis that it can distil from nothingness no
object which it is able to quantify or scrutinize1085 – or by logic1086 – which locates nothingness at the
furthest extreme of a process of negation, as a “formal concept of the imagined nothing” 1087 resting on
“nonbeing pure and simple.”1088 “[T]he nothing is the nothing,” Heidegger contends, “and if the nothing
represents total indistinguishability no distinction can obtain between the imagined and the „proper‟
nothing.” Nothingness is by this estimation most certainly real.1089 As to whether we arrive at nothing by
a process of negation, or whether nothingness is a point of departure, Heidegger is unambiguous:
“nothing is more original than the „not‟ and negation.”1090
By claiming for the notion of Angst1091 the status of a Grundstimmung, a fundamental pre-cognitive mood
marked by an “indeterminate unease or dread,”1092 Heidegger believed he had uncovered a reliable point
of contact between nothingness and the finitude of Dasein.1093 “Being and the nothing do belong
together,”1094 he suggests, “because Being...reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is
held out into nothing.”1095 In Being and Nothingness – the opening of which is an extended meditation on
the contradiction at the heart of Heidegger‟s What is Metaphysics? – Sartre understands nihilation as the
1084
Stephen Priest, “Nothingness,” Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London and New York:
Routledge), 2001, 135.
1085
Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 95-6.
1086
Ibid., 96-7, 99.
1087
Ibid., 99. On the relation of this point of logic to ontology, Heidegger might easily be misread, or judged
inconsistent, as he is by Paul Edwards (Paul Edwards, Heidegger’s Confusion, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004),
108-111.
1088
Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 97.
1089
Stone, “Heidegger and Carnap;” Edwards, Heidegger’s Confusion, 101.
1090
Heidegger intends „not‟ and negation synonymously (Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 97): the former
indicates the prefix which marks a negated substantive; the latter is more clearly associable with a process.
1091
It was Kierkegaard who first fixed Angst at the heart of the existentialist enterprise (Stone, “Heidegger and
Carnap,” 225).
1092
Ibid.
1093
“Only in the nothing of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their most proper possibility – that is, in a
finite way – come to themselves” (Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 108). In this way he seeks to address the
very moment of entrapment in metaphysics which, he believes, Nietzsche fails to apprehend in seeking to overcome
nihilism (Critchley, Very Little, 13-6).
1094
Here Heidegger adapts an Hegelian formula (Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 108).
1095
Ibid. Claiming that for Heidegger “we may think of Being only as gewesen, only as what is not present (any
longer),” Vattimo confirms that structural necessity of a negative transcendence is evident also from the perspective
of existence (Vattimo, End, 174).
209
necessary manner by which negation makes differentiation, and consequent identity, possible,1096 and that
this is an intrinsic operation insofar as “only Being can nihilate itself.”1097 It is difficult not to counter this
claim with the essentially Kantian observation – simple but compelling – that there is no manner of
reaching this conclusion unless some sort of transcendental consciousness is presupposed. Certainly, an
existential position sensitive to the situatedness and circularity of any hermeneutic by which it might seek
to unravel its own nature,1098 exhibits an awareness of this problem, but such an awareness is far from an
adequate resolution. For instance, from the outset of Being and Nothingness, Sartre demonstrates an
admirable grasp of the difficulties which consciousness brings to the examination of nothingness.1099
Nonetheless, we can proceed only by an axiomatic decision – an extension of the Parmenidean axiom of
the One – which finally diminishes the claim of consciousness in this regard: either nothingness is, or it is
not. Having decided in favour of the former, there are considerably fewer impediments to accepting that
nothingness possess a paradoxical agency – “the nothing itself nihilates;”1100 “nothingness is not”1101–
which somehow circumvents either external- or self-reference. Fundamentally ineffable, such agency
conditions the irreconcilable situation in which “[n]othingness can be conceived neither outside of Being,
nor in terms of Being.”1102 Thus, not only is it possible that “[n]othingness beyond the world accounts for
absolute negation” – since the agency of nothingness and that of Dasein, defined in terms of the
appearance and subsequent directedness towards finitude of beings within a world, are viewed as
inextricable – but also that we are able to endure the caesura which Sartre contends is a “permanent
possibility”1103 in any relation of a questioner to the question of nothingness.1104
1096
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An essay in phenomenological ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes
(London: Routledge, 1969), 7-9. Hereafter BN.
1097
Ibid., 22.
1098
Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Martha Woodmansee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995), 1, 5. In the shadow of Dilthey, Heidegger and Sartre (the latter by his adoption of a Heideggerian position in
this respect) regard the posing of questions regarding ontology as adequate evidence of the facticity of Being
(Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 96-7; Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 4, 23-4; Priest, Nothingness, 135).
1099
BN, 3-4. In properly phenomenological terms, this problem might be paraphrased in terms of the constitution of
intentional objects.
1100
Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 103. Heidegger writes, “Das Nichts selbst nichtet,” retaining nicht at the
root of both noun and verb, the latter which has been translated as nothings or noths in addition to nihilates
(Edwards, Heidegger’s Confusion, 102).
1101
BN, 22. It is important to stress in this phrase is refers to the active being of nothingness, and does not rest
merely on the linguistic ambiguity this phrase evidently evokes. There is a subtle but important intensification of
negation in Heidegger‟s claim – “the nothing is the nothing” – which is quoted above.
1102
Ibid.
1103
Ibid., 23.
1104
Such a situation is not structurally dissimilar to the Husserlian epochē (see page 143 of the present work). In a
remarkable passage, which provides a rapid and incisive summary of this work, Sartre identifies this caesura as “a
double movement of nihilation…[in which the questioner] nihilates the thing questioned in relation to himself by
placing it in a neutral state, between being and nonbeing – and that he nihilates himself in relation to the thing
210
In clear distinction from the earlier account of Being as essentially quantitative, the representation of
nothingness offered by Heidegger and Sartre is noteworthy for its qualitative contours. After all, it is by
various processes of qualitative distinction, differentiation, negation and synthesis that nothingness is
pursued. A quantitative account of nothingness would need to retain a degree of indifference – of
ungivenness – foreign to both thinkers. Two particularly interesting interventions in this difficult field
arrive in Emmanuel Levinas‟ elaboration of the il y a1105 – the “impersonal, anonymous, yet
inextinguishable „consummation‟ of being, which murmurs in the depth of nothingness...[which,]
inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is „being in general‟”1106 – and in Giorgio Agamben‟s formulation
of a metaphysical “ungroundedness”1107 which reveals an unmediated belonging in language.
Agamben‟s thoughtful work on the great struggle within which our metaphysical, cognitive and linguistic
relations to nothingness embroil us, continues to receive considerable and deserved attention. We restrict
our present commentary to a few remarks regarding the manner in which Agamben has sought to redress
the Heideggerian legacy in which nothingness is taken as the ground upon which the essential activity of
Being takes shape as a relation to finitude. In Language and Death Agamben traces this “fundamental
ontological dimension”1108 to the occurrence of Voice – a disposition “[n]o longer the experience of mere
sound and not yet the experience of a meaning,”1109 between “the voice as sound...or the animal
phonē,”1110 and the production of linguistic meaning.1111
Of a particular resonance here is the affective presence which marks Meredith Monk‟s minimalistinflected vocal music. Exemplifying the composer‟s search for “clear and simple structure[s] that would
allow for primal yet transparent vocal qualities,”1112 Monk‟s “Arctic Bar” (Track 20)1113 is a potent
instantiation of minimalism‟s affective capacity – habitually glossed over, but undeniably significant to
its popularity and critical success. Simple, direct and exuberant, this work exhibits the peculiar
questioned by wrenching himself from being in order to be able to bring out of himself the possibility of a nonbeing” (ibid.).
1105
I have preferred the original il y a over the English there is for the sake of consistency and ease of distinction.
1106
EE, 52.
1107
LD, xiii.
1108
Ibid., 32.
1109
Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 42.
1110
Mills, Philosophy of Agamben, 17.
1111
Ibid.
1112
Meredith Monk, “From Liner for Facing North Album, 1992,” Meredith Monk, 167.
1113
Meredith Monk, “Arctic Bar,” Facing North. ECM, 1992.
211
combination of predictability and angularity which characterizes the minimalist approach to harmonic
rhythm,1114 constituting the ground upon which Monk‟s singularly “expressive personal style”1115 takes
shape. At once atavistic, passionate and rational,1116 “Arctic Bar” evokes “the elemental, bracing clarity of
the northern landscape.”1117
Although its words are of no actual language, their emotional immediacy is undeniable. This is a happy
song, with no small hint of affective inebriation (its setting is, after all, a bar). The work explores a radical
vision of vocality qua breath, as a most immediate performance of eudaimonia – a human life of
goodness, virtue, fulfilment and happiness.1118 Monk‟s minimalism does not sidestep the voice as a
mimetic intermediary: it imitates the rhythms and intonation of Inuit speech, and most certainly the barks,
yelps and howls of husky dogs or northern wolves, and the play of plosives with dotted whining
diphthongs is intoxicating in its vivacity. Similarly evocative is the hocketting of breath-effects between
Monk and Een – the inhalation and exhalation of panting voicelessness, which is a radical marker of
organic processes of vocality, also evoking the hardships and toils typical of the northern cold, and
strengthening the sense of kinship between the two characters in Facing North. The physicality of the
landscape is equally audible: apparently barren, but in fact pulsing with life,1119 its vital expanses echo in
the sustained octaves towards the end of the work.
As a counterpoint to the starkness of the music which surrounds it in Facing North, “Arctic Bar” offers a
moment of intimacy and vulnerability in a landscape of extremes. Here the interplay, between the
contained simplicity of the repetitive piano obbligato and the buoyant, improvisatory vocal lines, renders
maximally transparent the tension between regularity and unpredictability1120 which characterizes the
pursuit of eudaimonia. In The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum elaborates the classical view according to
1114
Harmonic nodes appear asymmetrically but consistently, and within a straightforward diatonic frame, offering
points of partial convergence within the overall structure, over which a quasi-improvisatory vocal line expresses a
sense of controlled freedom which is characteristic of much ethnic and folk music. As with most minimalism and
postminimalism, repetition here is modular with minor additions to the original module contributing to the
propulsiveness of the composition. In terms of perceptible structure, the work consists of two sixteen-bar cycles
alternately repeated seven times, subtly asymmetrical in themselves and in relation to one another.
1115
Schwartz, Minimalists, 190.
1116
According to Schwartz, “[t]here is a beguiling enchantment and endearing ingenuousness to everything she
[Monk] does – a quality that might be described as naïve if that word didn‟t have pejorative connotations” (ibid.)
1117
Monk, Liner Notes, Facing North, 167.
1118
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), xii.
1119
Monk captures these numerous aspects of the work beautifully in her liner notes in terms of a “barren wilderness
and the fortitude and tenderness of two people surviving within it” (Monk, Liner Notes, Facing North, 168).
1120
“There is a real gap between being good and living well; uncontrolled happening can step into this gap,
impeding the good state of character from finding its fulfilment” (Nussbaum, Fragility, 334).
212
which eudaimonia is predicated very precisely upon accepting or overcoming the vicissitudes and
unpredictabilities which mark existence. Eudaimonia necessarily involves activity: “[t]he good condition
of a virtuous character…is a kind of preparation for activity; it finds its natural fulfilment and flourishing
in activity.”1121 My claim is that “Arctic Bar” is affective of happiness precisely to the extent that it
prompts both an internal and external sense of activity:1122 the former, structurally, in the momentum
which the interplay of the subtly asymmetrical repetitive accompaniment and improvisatory vocal lines
effect; the latter, in the affective relationship its vocality establishes with the listener. In both cases the
minimalist exposition of Voice qua embodiment and as a passage to the pre-linguistic, is crucial. Indeed,
Nussbaum maintains that “all human experiences are embodied, and thus realized in some kind of
material process. This given, human emotions are finally embodied processes as well. However, the
question is, are there any bodily states or processes that are constantly correlated with our experiences of
emotion.”1123
In this light, the question posed by Monk‟s “Arctic Bar” is the following: is there something in the
physics of this music – the combination of its vocalic expressiveness and direct, repetitive figures – which
is capable of triggering the relatively consistent affective material we identify as a type of happiness? If
this is indeed the case, then it might be possible to suggest that Voice reaches beyond mere form and
structure, to the most radical positive relation between material and affect. Regarding such an
unambiguously affirmative existentialism Agamben is rather more cautious. For him, Voice tries to grasp
the “event of language”1124 within an “interstitial”1125 topos – a place of “originary negativity sustaining
every negation”1126 insofar as it reveals a radical “ungroundedness,”1127 the “negative ground of man‟s
appearance in language.”1128 The conceptual trajectory is in numerous places proximate to the concerns
regarding nothingness developed by Heidegger and Sartre:1129 “Voice signifies...to become capable of
1121
Ibid., 324
Nussbaum provides a good summary of the relation between energeia and eudaimonia as it is represented by
Aristotle (ibid., 325-27). White notes, “[i]f there‟s to be a structure [of happiness]…it needs to be a dynamic
structure” (Nicholas P. White, A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 79).
1123
Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001),
58.
1124
Agamben, Idea of Language, 42.
1125
Mills, Philosophy of Agamben, 17.
1126
LD, 36.
1127
Ibid., xiii; Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009),
178.
1128
Mills, Philosophy of Agamben, 17.
1129
LD, 31, 56-7.,
1122
213
another death – no longer simply a deceasing, but a person‟s ownmost and insuperable possibility, the
possibility of freedom.”1130
Yet, we ought not to miss that Agamben urges thought beyond this impasse. Certainly it is true that he
regards Voice as the topos upon which the corresponding human faculties of language and death relate to
one another.1131 Through an interplay of structural negation,1132 language and death interrogate one
another: reflection on our linguistic capacity entertains a fascination with persistence, just as the reflection
on existential persistence reveals that our most ready means of indicating the place of Being is through
the event of language.1133 However, persistence is clearly thwarted by finitude and death, even as our
awareness of our own death is subject to a failed negotiation between language and the experience of
existence.1134 To the extent that Voice traverses this boundary between language and finitude, it indicates
the taking-place of language in time. However, it is towards the “taking-place of language as time”1135 –
towards language qua language,1136 or an Absolute which is beyond any “difference between showing and
telling, being and entity, world and thing”1137 – that Agamben‟s thought directs us. By “indicating the
pure taking place of language without any determinate event of meaning,” Agamben suggests “there is
still the possibility of thought beyond meaningful propositions.”1138 Here is a significantly novel
articulation of archaic nothingness which, in fact, makes room for the recuperation of the facticity of
positive Being where it seemed most remote. To accomplish this, Agamben sets himself the ambitious
task of identifying “the originary mythogeme of metaphysics in the silence of the Voice” 1139 – a tentative
gesture beyond this silence, towards “language without Voice, a word that is not grounded in any
1130
Ibid., 86.
Ibid., xii; Mills, Philosophy of Agamben, 11.
1132
This negation is internal to language and death inasmuch as the interrogation of either is structurally negative –
structuralism revealed this in a particularly concrete way as regards the former, while the latter offers us no positive
object for contemplation – but, more significantly, it is proper to relation itself.
1133
Agamben emphasizes that “[f]or Heidegger, as for Hegel, negativity enters into man because man has to be this
taking place [of language], he wants to seize the event of language” (LD, 31).
1134
Drawing attention to the manner in which in Being and Time Heidegger refuses the simple association of voice
on Being on the basis of a distinction of a being from Being in general, of a differentiation of the “living being (with
his voice) and man (with his language)” (LD, 55), Agamben claims that “Dasein – since language is not its voice –
can never grasp the taking place of language, it can never be its Da (the pure instance, the pure event of language)
without discovering that it is always already thrown and consigned to discourse” (LD, 56). In Agamben‟s estimation,
Voice enters Heidegger‟s conception of negativity in “What is Metaphysics?” (LD, 60) and more decisively still in
his later conception of the eventality of Being in terms of Ereignis - “the co-belonging of Being and time” (LD, 101)
– which demonstrates how Heidegger finally comes to view the Voice as “that which gives and attunes Being and
time” (LD, 102).
1135
LD, 99.
1136
Mills, Philosophy of Agamben, 21.
1137
LD, 92.
1138
Agamben, Idea of Language, 43.
1139
LD, 94.
1131
214
meaning,”1140 and which “remains to be thought as the most human dimension.”1141 It seeks the aperture
to a manner of existing outside of our bondage to absolute negativity – to make of this ungroundedness an
“ethos of humanity by grasping the simple fact of our „having‟ language.”1142
Here, where the connection between the aleatory frailty but persistence of the human voice becomes
apparent, Beckett‟s writing – its growing silence and increasing disembodiment by various technologies
of reproduction and mediation – exhibits a increasing discomfort in relation to the apparent compulsion to
exist. Voice marks our spectral, linguistic citizenship of a poietic atopia even as it retreats, in this
withdrawal intimating precisely the aesthetic thought beyond meaning which, no longer bound in a
relation to finitude, recognizes its infinite vocation of presenting the taking-place of the Real. In their
opposition to the Heideggerian measurement of Being as a relation to finitude, Agamben and Badiou
share a commitment to discovering the radix of pure Being qua infinitude, albeit Badiou‟s formulation of
multiplicity takes its shape from mathematics, while Agamben asserts the primacy of language. For the
latter, it is in-fancy1143 – the radix prior to language1144 that is necessary for Being to emerge through
language – which we approximate in trying to grasp language qua language. Language, insofar as it
carries meaning, presents the vehicle for an existential maximalism. Language qua language, on the other
hand, seeks to expose that, prior to meaning, language exists as pure means1145 – an admirable
minimalism, for certain. In aesthetic terms, might we not recall Perreault‟s claim, cited above, that
“[w]hat is minimal about Minimal Art...is the means not the end,”1146 extending it to suggest that perhaps
1140
Ibid., 95.
Ibid., 96; See Mills, Philosophy of Agamben, 12.
1142
Ibid., 21.
1143
In-fancy is “a primary experience...[which is] before language: a „worldless‟ experience in the literal sense of the
term, a human infancy [in-fancy], whose boundary would be marked by language” (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and
History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 54). Hereafter IH.
As Deranty emphasizes, what is before language finally must be understood pragmatically, as “prior to language use
and not to language in general” (Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Witnessing the Inhuman,” The Agamben Effect, ed. Alison
Ross, spec. issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 107.1 (2008): 170), since in-fancy “coexists in its origins with
language” (ibid., 171): the prelinguistic must be thought from the midst of language. Of infancy as “„transcendentalhistorical‟” (ibid.) condition of the emergence of the subject, Agamben speculates: “perhaps this age is also the age
of man‟s in-fantile dwelling (in-fantile, that is, without Voice or will, and yet ethical, habitual) in language (LD, 92).
Also see Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 91-3; Mills, Philosophy of Agamben, 24-7.
1144
This is properly “„never spoken language,‟ yet still real” (IH, 57).
1145
Agamben uses the term means to reopen the potentiality inherent in notion of a gesture precisely to the extent
that it is possible to understand poiesis as immanent to its process – an “exhibition of mediality” (Giorgio Agamben,
Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 2000), 58), or the “communication of communicability” (ibid., 59) – rather than in the retrospection fixed from
the perspective of end or telos.
1146
Perreault, “Minimal Abstract,” 260.
1141
215
what is minimal is that in minimalism we discover pure means, without ends – an art which understands
itself as a gesture towards its own immanence?
Art has not been shy in attempting to grasp the aesthetic situation through which we encounter language
qua language, albeit this has seldom been discussed under the rubric of minimalism. Gertrude Stein‟s
Sacred Emily is a particularly fine literary exemplar of several of minimalism‟s most poignant techniques
of reduction. Both identical repetition and incremental addition and subtraction powerfully communicate
poietic distension – the transfiguration of the poem from its status as a container of meaningful references
towards existing as a self-referential concrete entity composed of and within a language barely able to
cohere by the sheer weight of its presence. From this poem comes Stein‟s most celebrated line – “Rose is
a rose is a rose is a rose”1147 – a symbol of her concrete relation to language and of the pretensions of
language to a universalist nominalism. “[W]hen language was new,” she claims “...the poet could use the
name of the thing and the thing was really there.”1148 To the modern writer, it is apparent “the
excitingness of pure being ha[s] withdrawn from [language]”1149 in which case we are left with the task
either of revitalizing its exhausted nouns, or of recognizing something Real at the heart of language itself.
To a critical interlocutor Stein once responded regarding her famous line: “Now listen! I‟m no fool. I
know that in daily life we don‟t go around saying „is a…is a…is a.‟”1150 Here repetition alludes not only
to a faithfulness to phenomenological experience “whereby each restatement reflect[s] the flux of
change”1151 in the writer, but also to a poietic yearning for the decontamination of the relation between
word and thing and to a language firm in relation to its own objecthood (language qua language). If this
reiteration “demystif[ies] the emphatic nature of nomination and the evocation of being,”1152 as Blanchot
suggests,1153 it is in order to rework the concrete ground upon which noun and word grasp one another.
1147
Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily,” Geography and Plays (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 187.
Gertrude Stein qtd. in Thornton Wilder, Introduction, Four in America by Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale UP,
1947), v.
1149
Ibid.
1150
Ibid.
1151
Roston, Modernist Patterns, 124-5. Edmund Wilson memorably characterizes Stein‟s use of repetition as a
“technique of mesmerism” (Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
(London: Collins, 1967), 192), a sentiment often echoed in criticism of minimalist music (Strickland, Minimalism,
174-5; Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 204-6).
1152
Maurice Blanchot, “A rose is a rose...,” The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and
London: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 343. This can be fruitfully compared to the claims regarding the name in
Literature and the Right to Death (Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” GO, 46-8. Hereafter LRD.
1153
It is not insignificant in this regard that Blanchot misquotes Stein, beginning this famous phrase with the
indefinite article “a” rather than the “noun” rose, for Stein is after precisely the thing which Blanchot believes
language, in its manner of indicating, fails to grasp.
1148
216
Although in entirely different registers, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and Lettrists similarly regard
their work as an exposition of the concreteness of language qua language. The poetry composed and
improvised by Isidore Isou (Track 21),1154 the seminal figure of Lettrism, identifies the letter as the most
minimal element of language. By “always taking all the letters together; unfolding...the marvels brought
about by letters...creating an architecture of lettric rhythms,”1155 Isou believed he had discovered a means
of presenting “transitions between feeling and saying” 1156 – a manner of “concretising silence; writing
nothings.”1157 Often as brutal as it is primal, this work offers perhaps the most plausible poetic equivalent
of the radical situation which Agamben conceives in terms of in-fancy.1158 Shifting from letter to word,
the couplets of Barrett Watten‟s “Complete Thought” are remarkable ciphers of the problematic relation
of discourse and world addressed by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry – ideas explored initially in the
eponymous journal – and also striking examples of minimalist containment:
I
The word is complete.
Books demand limits.
...
VI
Worn-out words are invented.
We read daylight in books.
...
XIII
Connected pieces break into name.
Petrified trees are similar.
XIV
Everyday life retards potential.
Calculation governs speech.
...
XVIII
Language ceases to be the future.
Thinking becomes a religious device.1159
The insight Watten provides in this work is to a language inextricable from thought, yet which is also
buried by this same inextricability. That nothingness is that against which language tarries as its very
destiny, is a point close to Watten‟s heart.1160 For when language qua language loses its potential for an
1154
Isidore Isou, “Improvisation,” Poemes Lettristes 1944-1999.
Isidore Isou, “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry,” Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln and
London: U of Nebraska P, 2001), 545-6.
1156
Ibid., 545.
1157
Ibid., 546.
1158
This concept is discussed in greater detail below.
1159
Barrett Watten, “Complete Thought” <http://www.literairtijdschriftparmentier.nl/pop.php?id=65> 15 July 2012.
1160
Watten offers a discussion of negativity in recent poetry as profound as it is incisive (Watten, Constructivist
Moment, 238-290).
1155
217
organic unity with thought, it is handed over to a situation in which “[l]anguage ceases to be the future,”
and we are once again subjugated by an ontotheological politics in which thought is reduced to a mere
“religious device.” Our political and economic being in language is increasingly governed by a
“calculation,” as we are pressured towards providing evermore accurate epistemological accounts of
reality – the “books” in which “worn-out words” become the currency substituted, displacing existential
immediacy. Watten identifies in Ron Padgett‟s quasi-sonnet, Nothing in That Drawer, a potent symbol of
language qua language and the original relation it might have born to the Real. Repetition empties the
poem of the essentially artificial fantasy that there need exist containers or nodes of meaning by effecting
in the reader a certain existential amnesia: “[s]uddenly, the entire universe turns into the dark matter of
nothing in that drawer: that‟s all we get.”1161
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.1162
While we cannot reasonably expect to find a more minimal expression than Nothing in That Drawer
within a conventional poetic form – Padgett‟s own self-reflexive Haiku, “First: five syllables/ Second:
seven syllables/ Third: five syllables”1163 perhaps comes closest – there are many for whom the actual
physicality of writing, etching, typing or inscribing appears a more radical exposure of the stuff of
language. Cy Twombly‟s work1164 is interesting in this respect, since often it is formed from the same
scriptoral gestures as those of writing. Exemplary of his “language of indiscernible writing”1165 are Cold
1161
Watten, Constructivist Moment, 263.
Ron Padgett, “Nothing in That Drawer,” Great Balls of Fire, (Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1990), 5.
1163
Ron Padgett, “Haiku,” New and Selected Poems (Boston: David R. Godine, 1995), 6.
1164
Twombly‟s output includes conventional painting and sculpture, but we refer here primarily to those works
which consist of inscriptions with graphite, chalk and crayon on painted canvases and other surfaces, as well as
various other graphic media hospitable to drawing and writing on paper, etching, and so forth.
1165
Heiner Bastian, “Since It Shouldn‟t Be, Since It Happens,” Cy Twombly: Das Graphische Werk 1953-1984: A
Catalogue Raisonné of the Printed Graphic Work, ed. Heiner Bastian (New York: New York UP, 1985), 17.
1162
218
Stream (Figure 72)1166 and Arcadia (Figure 73).1167 In the former we encounter a repetitive urgency,1168 an
inscription repeatedly looping across itself in a manic attempt simultaneously to uncover and recover the
threatening nothingness of the pre-linguistic blank page and black canvas. The reticent marks of the latter,
by contrast, expose “the intensity of the tremor of communication,”1169 its diaphanous “calligraphic
gestures...barely touch[ing] the page.”1170 Much as the letters which spell Arcadia are faint but
unmissable, so, too, do Twombly‟s pieces evoke a complex poietic relationship with history and time,1171
“revitalizing the tracings of the hand, to write in archaic symbols of temptation and possession.”1172 His
aesthetic consciousness is moulded unambiguously from the stuff of Classical Greece and Rome, 1173 yet
sacrifices none of its relation to the contemporary, or its capacity for negotiating a poietic path between
the singularity of its aesthetic expression and its universality as ur-script.
Figure 72: Cy Twombly, Cold Stream, 1966.
1166
Cy Twombly, Cold Stream, 1966.
Cy Twombly, Arcadia, 1958.
1168
Susan C. Larsen, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper 1954-1976,” Cy Twombly: Works on Paper 1954-1976:
Newport Harbor Art Museum (Newport Beach: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1981), 24.
1169
Tacita Dean (Tacita Dean, “A Panegyric,” Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate,
2008), 36.
1170
Larsen, Cy Twombly, 20.
1171
Ibid., 30; Dean, Panegyric, 37-8, 40-1; Roland Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” trans. Annette Lavers, Cy
Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977 (New York, Whitney Museum, 1979), Works on Paper, Sculpture,
ed. Harald Szeemann (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1987), 16-9.
1172
Bastian, Since, 15.
1173
It is possible to deduce significant affinities between Twombly‟s work and that of Ian Hamilton Finlay, several
works of whom are discussed elsewhere in the present work.
1167
219
Roland Barthes, who paid significant attention to Twombly‟s oeuvre, identifies in his work a carefully
disintegrated calligraphy of letters, handwritten words, and “marks of measurement...tiny algorithms.” 1174
These are scriptoral gestures in the precise sense recognized by Agamben: here we encounter an
exposition of aesthetic means without end, or means where the only end or telos is their radical resistance
to any further decomposition.1175 Writing fills the space of language in an attempt to think its depths qua
nothingness. In this sense Twombly‟s scriptoral work1176 presents the substance of a minimal quantity – a
visual continuum1177 “without [clear] beginning or end”1178 – in which contingently unifying calculation
comes from “combining the small and the smallest elements.”1179 What is most remarkable of this work,
even at its most intricate, is that it maintains at its aesthetic centre an “absolute spaciousness”1180 – a
rareness1181 and thought of absence,1182 which mark a minimal radix from which we apprehend the poietic
exhalation of the work – that it “does not grasp at anything; it is situated, it floats and drifts.”1183
1174
Barthes, Wisdom, 18.
Ibid., 15.
1176
It is necessary to mention that Twombly used a number of techniques, many of them far more muscular and
expressionistic than this subtle writing.
1177
Ibid., 20.
1178
Bastian, Since, 23.
1179
Ibid., 23, 25.
1180
Barthes, Wisdom, 12.
1181
In this term, Barthes refers to “that which has gaps or interstices, sparse, porous, scattered”(ibid., 13).
1182
Ibid., 21.
1183
Ibid., 22.
1175
220
Figure 73: Cy Twombly, Arcadia, 1958.
Musing upon Twombly‟s negotiation of matter and nothingness, Barthes offers a compelling
metaphysical proposition: “the essence of things is not in their weight but in their lightness.” 1184 From the
perspective of the Real, however, it is certainly impossible to know whether or not language qua language
– if this is what such an essence attempts to approximate – legitimately claims to encounter nothingness,
except as an analogy. The evasiveness of pre-linguistic nothingness is equally evident in situations
belonging to Voice as it is in those conceived in terms of writing, and slides away from definition
regardless of which expressive medium these appropriate. It may well be that the Real is most intelligible
in terms of existential lightness, but it is difficult to accept that any confrontation with nothingness is not
simultaneously weighed down by pervasive ignorance. It is perhaps the vocation of minimalism to expose
the Real by examining the aesthetic both of extreme rareness and lightness, as well as of weight and
density. The task of contemplating nothingness as a nihilating heaviness in Being is an onerous one given
that this thought must remain a response to that which is ungiven in existence – to that which is absolute,
independent, Real. Setting our horizons beyond a Heideggerian nothingness which nihilates, beyond
Agamben‟s in-fancy and its substitution of pre-givenness for an essential ungivenness, this radix must be
1184
Ibid., 10.
221
a presentation which has no equivalent either in material or conceptual representation. It is singular, in
Badiou‟s terminology – present without being represented.1185 In language easily approachable by
aesthetics, it is perhaps that which Levinas designates by the il y a which comes closest to this notion of
nothingness as presence.1186
c) The minimal presentation of nothingness
The shift in Levinas‟ thought, which affirms the absolute alterity at the heart of the ethical relation as the
means of transcending the finitude of Being,1187 is perhaps over-documented. As a result, it is easy to
underestimate the centrality of the il y a – which recognizes Being in general as a presence so relentless it
cannot even be conceived in a dialectic relationship to absence – to the entire corpus of his work.1188
Accompanying the intuition of the il y a is a privation which, for Levinas, induces a “weariness of
oneself,”1189 which prompts his search for the extra-ontological situation he identifies in terms of an ethics
of absolute alterity.1190 Yet, the il y a is perhaps not as mercurial as Levinas‟ somewhat hyperbolic
descriptions might suggest. To understand what Levinas intends by the term, it is first necessary to
understand his adaption of the ontico-ontologcial difference of Heidegger by distinguishing but not
separating1191 existence (Being) from existents (beings).1192 In short, the il y a designates the totality of
Being – being qua being which Badiou believes may be accurately apprehended by mathematics, but
which, for phenomenologists such as Levinas, can be entertained in terms of knowability only as the
1185
BE, 100.
That Levinas adopts this “idea of nothing [as] an idea of being” (John Llewylyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The
genealogy of ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 10) from Bergson is acknowledged, but parenthetic
to the present argument.
1187
“The comprehension of Being in general cannot dominate the relationship with the Other. The latter relationship
commands the first. I cannot disentangle myself from society with the Other, even when I consider the Being of the
existent he is…this relationship with the Other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent…precedes all ontology;
it is the ultimate relation in Being” (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969), 478).
1188
Levinas himself draws attention to the centrality of the il y a to his project as a whole (Emmanuel Levinas, Is It
Righteous To Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), 47. Hereafter
IRB.
1189
Ibid., 46.
1190
EE, 96.
1191
“The relation between beings and Being does not link up two independent terms. „A being‟ has already made a
contact with Being; it cannot be isolated from it. It is” (EE, 1).
1192
“Sein and Seindes, Being and being...I prefer to render as existing and existent” (Emmanuel Levinas, Time and
the Other [and additional essays], trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987), 44). Hereafter TO;
EE, 1, 76; IRB, 131.
1186
222
entirety of the force of Being.1193 The problem, as Levinas detects, is that “thought slips imperceptibly
from the notion of Being qua Being,1194 that by virtue of which an existing being exists, to the idea of a
cause of existence, a „Being in general.‟”1195
What can be experienced of this force of Being differs depending on whether we approach it in terms of
existence – in which case the force of the il y a is one of pure presentation1196 – or from the perspective of
existents – where we can apprehend it only negatively,1197 or obliquely in terms of a “modality of
being.”1198 The il y a is that of Being which cannot be represented.1199 It is a pre-conceptual,1200 prereflective and pre-cognitive response to Being which defies equivalence;1201 it is the pervasive atmosphere
of horror1202 which Levinas believes follows the threat of absolute existential anonymity;1203 an
experience of the weight of Being,1204 the faint rumble falling towards complete silence,1205 the insomnia
of an endless night in which exhausted vigilance is perpetual;1206 a dying within which there is no
1193
“The existing that I am trying to approach is the very work of being...Behind every negation this ambience of
being, this being as a „field of forces,‟ reappears, as the field of every affirmation and negation” (TO, 48).
1194
The capitalization here is Levinas‟.
1195
EE, 1.
1196
“[T]his universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence” (EE, 52). See also EE,
53-4; TO, 35, 65.
1197
“[E]xisting cannot be purely and simply affirmed, because one always affirms a being...But it imposes itself
because one cannot deny it” (TO, 48). See TO, 85-6; EE, 9, 52-3, 59-60.
1198
EE, 84. Such modalities follow closely what Heidegger intends by Stimmung or mood (Critchley, Very Little,
57).
1199
The il y a, paradoxically, is filled with “the absence of any being” (EE, 56); as a “loss of world” for both subject
and object (Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999),
92), it escapes all means of representation. See Paul Davies, “On Resorting to an Ethical Language,” Ethics as First
Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, ed. Adriaan T.
Peperzak (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 96; TO, 35-6, 75-6; Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its
Shadow,” Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 12.
1200
Arguably, it is even a non-concept.
1201
EE, 10-2, 55, 61; Benjamin C. Hutchens, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004), 140; Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 5.
1202
EE, 5, 55-8; IRB, 45; Robbins, Altered Reading, 92.
1203
Absolute existential anonymity would refer to a situation in which no subject or object which exists has any
effects in existence. The anonymity of the il y a – the counterpoint to identity, which marks the hypostasis of the
subject – is a principal term in Levinas‟ writing. See Levinas, “Shadow,” 9; EE, 23, 37, 44, 52, 82, 88; TO, 33, 47-8,
52, 62, 65-7. See also Richard A. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001), 176 and Wall, Radical Passivity, 5.
1204
TO, 35, 62; EE, 51, 76; IRB, 46.
1205
It is towards a “being in complete silence” (IRB, 212) that the “anonymous rumbling of existence” (EE, 23)
seems to point us.
1206
“I am going to characterize the there is...by a vigilance without possible recourse to sleep,” (TO , 48-9), where
sleep is not a state of unconsciousness, but a “modality of being” (EE, 84). See also EE, 55, 64; Robbins, Altered
Reading, 94.
223
death.1207 In its immanent ungivenness, the il y a “transcends inwardness as well as exteriority; it does not
even make it possible to distinguish these...The subject-object distinction by which we approach existents
is not the starting point for a meditation which broaches being in general.”1208 The il y a, existence such as
it is, could be apprehended only if all existents were annihilated.1209 This would be existence “full of the
nothingness of everything.”1210
That we are not consumed by pure presence, the “presence of absence...[which] embraces and dominates
its contradictory,”1211 owes, for Levinas, to the simple reason that Being, in any context we might
potentially grasp, is always an experience of Being.1212 “[T]he fact of being given is the world,”1213 he
asserts. “Through taking position in the anonymous [il y a] a subject is affirmed.”1214 Levinas terms this
adoption of a position hypostasis, which, in short, amounts to the upsurge of an existent.1215 Although the
il y a “is the place where hypostasis will be produced,”1216 it offers no conventional ground.1217 It is rather
a grounding force from which is subtracted another force – the hypostatic force by which a minimal
concept1218 takes shape, which suspends the non-conceptual indeterminateness of the il y a in which
“anything can count for anything else.”1219 Hypostasis is thus a beginning,1220 an instantiation1221 through
which a minimal consciousness emerges.1222 From such consciousness is derived the directed experience
which appears in terms of “the indissoluble unity between the existent and its work of existing.”1223
1207
The unremitting presence of the il y a defines existential persistence in terms of “an abyss between the present
and death,” a “the strangeness of the future of death” (TO, 81). See TO, 50-1, 69-73, 81-2; EE, 56-7, 77; Levinas,
“Shadow,” 11-2; Robbins, Altered Reading, 92, 96; Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 9.
1208
EE, 52.
1209
TO, 46-7.
1210
EE, 53.
1211
Ibid., 60.
1212
In this respect, Levinas is a very conventional phenomenologist. If, however, we regard the il y a in terms of its
facticity – and Levinas is unambiguous on this point (ibid., 3, 51, 61, 85; TO, 42,45-7,) – we should be cautious of
overstating its relation to experience (EE, 52), either in Wall‟s terms as “our „oldest‟ experience” (Wall, Radical
Passivity, 29), or Critchley‟s (paraphrasing Blanchot) as the “experience of consciousness without a subject”
(Critchley, Very Little, 58).
1213
EE, 30.
1214
EE, 82.
1215
Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 7-8.
1216
TO, 50.
1217
Ibid., 47.
1218
Here concept refers a non-physical substantive.
1219
EE, 54.
1220
TO, 67.
1221
The instant describes the temporal point, without duration, at which an existent arises from existence (EE, 72).
1222
“[L]ife in the world is consciousness inasmuch as it provides the possibility of existing in a withdrawal from
existence” (ibid., 37-8). Elsewhere, Levinas describes such consciousness in terms of the solitude of the existent
within existence (ibid., 84; TO, 54-5, 67).
1223
Ibid., 43.
224
Hypostasis, however, reveals a significant tension in Levinas‟ thought between interiority and exteriority,
and the manner in which these negotiate our understanding of subject and object. As the proper ingression
of an existent into existence, hypostasis marks “the apparition of a substantive.”1224 Since hypostasis is
also a “localization of consciousness”1225 this process is predominantly associated with a process of
human “subjectivization”1226 which directs the incipient subject towards the specificity of identity.1227 Yet,
it is clear that activity is not simply withheld from ordinary things. A hypostatic entity holds together two
points of definition: it is “that which is,”1228 and also that which “is a subject of the verb to be.”1229 By
assuming Being,1230 by taking-up beginning in Being, an entity clearly marks its fundamental positivity
qua activity. However, as differentiation within the indifference of the il y a, the activity of consciousness
is in fact a “retrograde movement.”1231 It attempts to pin down “what cannot disappear”1232 in that which
has already taken place.1233
Here we might allow Harman‟s insight to the “unbridgeable gap between being in general and this being
in general as experienced”1234 to resonate on its own terms:
The anonymous work of existence occurs in the sheer labor of things at being what they are, and not in any
supposed access we might have to this labor, not even a noncognitive sort of access. The il y a...however
devoid it may be of specific features, already stands at an infinite remove from the infernal work of objects.
It is not being itself that is experienced...but only being as being. No two realities could be more
different.1235
1224
EE, 83.
Ibid., 67.
1226
Ibid. By subjectivizing, Levinas means the process of producing a subject, and so this term is roughly equivalent
to subjectivating which, following Badiou, is generally preferred in the present work. On Levinas‟ anthropocentric
bias regarding hypostasis, see Graham Harman, Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago
and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), 242.
1227
TO, 67.
1228
EE, 83.
1229
Ibid.
1230
Ibid.
1231
Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas, 8.
1232
Ibid.
1233
As far as our retrospective comprehension of the il y a is concerned, Levinas is unambiguous: it “is a
relationship only by analogy. For the Being which we become aware of when the world disappears is not a person or
a thing, or the sum total of persons and things; it is the fact that one is, the fact that there is” (EE, 8).
1234
Harman, Tool Being, 239.
1235
Ibid.
1225
225
The very possibility of recognizing the subjectivating activity of hypostasis arises only because of an
asymmetry which persists in the relation1236 of every existent to alterity (that is, radical externality). In
one sense, the balance of existence always favours the plenitude of objects – “to be in the world is to be
attached to things;”1237 “human life in the world does not go beyond the objects that fulfil it”1238 – but at
the same time, existents ceaselessly tip towards the subject, are at the subject‟s “disposal,”1239 precisely
because even the minimal intervention of consciousness excites from the subject an extraordinary
valence.
Thus, while there is every reason to contend, as does Harman‟s daring analysis, that Levinas‟ thought
centres on the “improved status of concrete things”1240 – after all, “Being...is scattered across the full
multitude of entities that inhabit the world,1241 defining each as being just what it is”1242 – it remains
impossible to deduce from this that either subject or object can be associated with fundamental activity as
such.1243 Like Heidegger, Levinas locks givenness and facticity together – the “world is given;”1244 but the
“fact of being given is the world”1245 – paradoxically rendering knowability subordinate to its own
terms.1246
In short, every entity presents the quantitative dimension of the il y a, of pure Being, but, from a
phenomenological perspective, this can be apprehended only by a qualitative subtraction from this
fundamental quantity. It is upon this point that the present work departs from Levinas. It is no act of precognitive, analogical approximation, or any tool of representation, that renders the il y a knowable. The il
1236
In my view, it is unclear in Levinas‟ early work whether this relation is potential or actual, or whether alterity is
finally located in the il y a, the Other, or both.
1237
EE, 27.
1238
TO, 63.
1239
EE, 30.
1240
Harman, Tool Being, 237. Llewelyn identifies in Levinas‟ work a “quest for concreteness” (Llewelyn,
Emmanuel Levinas, 22).
1241
This formulation seems something of an ontological equivalent to Edwin Hutchins‟ distributed cognition which
aims “to put cognition back into the social and cultural world...[by] mov[ing] the boundaries of the cognitive unity
of analysis out beyond...the individual person,” (Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, Mass and
London: MIT, 1995, xiv), recognizing that it is distributed across social groups, between structures of internality and
externality, and through time (Arthur M. Glenberg, “Radical changes in cognitive process due to technology: A
jaundiced view,” Cognition Distributed: How cognitive technology extends our minds, ed. Itiel E. Dror and Steven
Harnad (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008), 76).
1242
Harman, Tool Being, 241.
1243
Arguably, Harman goes too far in focusing his claim that all entities “take a stance within the world and
command our attention” (ibid.) through the thought of Levinas.
1244
EE, 38. “[T]he fact of being given is the world” (ibid., 30).
1245
Ibid.
1246
This would amount to a recursive epistemological position in which knowledge is always derived from the
structures of knowledge which we are given in order to know.
226
y a is knowable because it is, in fact, nothing other than the Real which persists indifferently in any entity
– its simplest quantitative being. Like the Real, the il y a cannot not take place in every entity: it cannot be
declined, nor is it able to desist by any force of its own. These are absolute to the entity in the precise
sense reserved by Meillassoux: an “outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as
indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is.”1247 The il y a and the Real similarly configure that which
in every entity is proper to its persistence without furnishing it with any particular qualities. This is not
too far from that which is noted above in Harman‟s terms as the “sheer labor of things at being what they
are.” “The key to the structure of reality would lie not between being and beings, but in beings
themselves.”1248
The Real is the depth, weight, and density of every entity qua self-relation.1249 “Not grace but gravity
characterizes the il y a,”1250 as Llewelyn notes, which reverses Barthes notion of an essential lightness in
existence. Such self-relation is not, as Robbins mistakenly suggests, contingent on any type of
performativity,1251 but rather subject to an inertness which bars it from identification even as it admits it to
the Real. Yet, if the instant of hypostasis1252 presents a point of suspension, there remains no simple
exit1253 from the burdensome impassivity of Being.1254 Consciousness cannot fully withdraw from itself,
and it is this curious impotentiality of the subject in relation to its own impotence that stimulates Levinas
to probe the il y a in its manner of supervening upon vitality and death. In sharp contradistinction to the
Heideggerian conviction that the care for Being is inextricable from an existent‟s relation to its finitude,
for Levinas the mark of existence is precisely its relation to infinitude,1255 to the “the eternal futurity of
1247
AF, 7.
Harman, Tool Being, 240. Llewellyn emphasizes “internal dialectic of [a being‟s] internal engagement with its
own existence” (Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas, 32).
1249
Although of a different phenomenological register, there is a certain similarity here to the manner in which
Merleau-Ponty suggests of reality that we must “delve into the thickness of the world” (PP, 204). See also Taylor
Carman, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 180, 190-2.
1250
Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas, 28. In aesthetic terms, this is a significant alternative to the standard modernist
fare regarding an epiphanic, transfigurative as the truth of Being, especially as revealed in art. Particularly as regards
the connection of minimalism to the il y a, we might oppose to Levinas‟ “gravity” the final phrase of Fried‟s
quintessentially modernist reproof of minimalism in Art and Objecthood : “presentness is grace” (Fried, Art and
Objecthood, 147).
1251
Robbins, Altered Reading, 99. See also Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas, 13-4.
1252
Here it is important to note Llewelyn‟s distinction of monist hypostasis – subjective substantiation – from plural
hypostasis – substantiation by the Other (ibid., 182-3).
1253
EE, 57; TO, 50.
1254
As Llewelyn usefully points out, we should not mistake the “transcendence to a new state of existence,” which
is shaped, for Levinas, by alterity, with “excedence that would be the exit from existence.” (Llewellyn, Emmanuel
Levinas, 11).
1255
I should like to point to several agreements between the ontology of Levinas and Badiou. In resisting Being as a
question of finitude, both commit to a vision of ontological infinity: the il y a attempts to grasp the same
1248
227
death,”1256 so that in existing we are fixed in perpetuity to the “duration of the interval – the
meanwhile...[which is] never finished, still enduring.”1257 This “time of dying,”1258 presents the temporal
intuition that “[n]othingness is impossible,”1259 and particularly so from the perspective of an existent.
Consequently, “death qua nothingness”1260 is simply a fantasy of no longer being bound to the immanence
of Being and its revelation of the bankcruptcy of any future event of metaphysical redemption. Death is
the most banal of all existential occurrences – this is above all the lesson of the il y a – and the time of
dying becomes a marker for the manner in which an existent reaches for its minimal existential intensity.
Critchley encapsulates the situation well in suggesting that “representations of death are
misrepresentations”1261 The laconic1262 prose of Maurice Blanchot – exemplifying a “carefully
constructed dynamic of eschewal and restriction,”1263 the austere markers of a certain brand of
minimalism which he shares with several prominent nouveaux romanciers1264 – exhibits its consciousness
fundamental multiplicity Badiou describes as being qua being (MP, 81), although where Levinas asserts that the
infinite aspect of the subject owes to the incommensurable encounter of a subject existing within the il y a and
absolute alterity, introduced via intersubjectivity (EE, 99-100), Badiou is adamant that the process of subjectivation
is a positive localization, a finite expression tied to the production of an infinite truth (BE, 396-9). Both endorse a
notion of an event through which subjectivity arises, but whereas for Levinas this is a hypostatic instant which gives
rise to subjective consciousness (EE, 70-1; TO, 52), for Badiou the event is a trans-ontological eruption of pure
novelty in Being, and has nothing to do with consciousness (BE, 189-90, 397; Alain Badiou, “The Event as TransBeing,” TW, 100). Rather, an event presents the possibility of realigning the contents of a situation – a process of
subjectivation, or what Badiou calls the pursuit of an infinite truth (Badiou, “Truth,” 129). Alterity, for Badiou, is
thus located solely in the event which actively sets in motion a process of subjectivation, whereas for Levinas, it is
in practical terms an encounter which takes place subsequent to the emergence of a subject – admittedly of any such
encounter we will be able to say that alterity must always already have been a possibility from the outset for this
encounter to have taken place. These philosophers respond to similar intuitions regarding Being, but whereas Badiou
formalizes these in relation to set theory – that is, a language which resists self-referential paradox – Levinas
remains caught within what Meillassoux describes as the “correlationist circle” (AF, 5) of phenomenology, in which
every intuition of externality inevitably undermines itself by the fact that it is, finally, offered on the basis of a point
of access, from the perspective of consciousness as positive phenomenon (the subject remains rooted to itself).
1256
TO, 71.
1257
Levinas, “Shadow,” 11. See Critchley, Very Little, 32, 70-2; Wall, Radical Passivity, 24.
1258
Levinas, “Shadow,” 11.
1259
TO, 73. “It is nothingness that would have left humankind the possibility of assuming death and snatching a
supreme mastery from out of the servitude of existence” (ibid.).
1260
Levinas, “Shadow,” 11. See also TO, 50-1.
1261
Critchley, Very Little, 73.
1262
Leslie Hill notes of Blanchot‟s narrative a significant reversal, “of suspense as completion and completion as
suspense” (Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 145.
1263
Motte, Small Worlds, 26.
1264
In addition to its stylistic paucacity, it is replete with “[m]oments of repetition, recurrence, or return,” (Hill,
Blanchot, 154), which are similarly and obsessively deployed both by Robbe-Grillet and Beckett, foremost amongst
others.
228
of this point by offering a powerful vision of the time of dying.1265 Exemplary in this respect is “Death
Sentence,” the two distinct narrative sections of which attest to the significant conceptual consonances
between Levinas and Blanchot, albeit the latter arrives at these through a primarily poietic field1266 to
which the former is not particularly sensitive.1267 Indeed, from the first, Blanchot specifies that here is an
act of writing1268 – a necessarily circuitous presentation of the generative conflict which plays out in
literature between the poietic production and the mimetic imitation of the Real.1269 In the first part, which
centres on the dying of J., we are presented with the following startling exchange between J. and her
nurse:
I know that...[J.] sometimes talked to her at night for quite a long time: she asked her to describe some of
the suffering she had witnessed as a nurse; and she asked her, „Have you ever seen death?‟ „I have seen
dead people, Miss.‟ „No, death!‟ The nurse shook her head. „Well, soon you will see it.‟” 1270
J. dies awaiting the arrival of the writer, a confidant who has witnessed her protracted illness,
subsequently undergoes a miraculous resurrection, and then a second death two days later, but seems to
remain bound within an atopos of nightmarish ambiguity – a persistent cycle of decline, death and
resurrection.1271 The true terror of this interminability1272 – of this “infinity of a timeless instant”1273 – is
revealed in a growing awareness that J.‟s prophetic utterance – “soon you will see [death]” – is directed
not to the nurse, but to the reader, and is fulfilled, although finally frustratedly, in the climactic attempt of
1265
Through a set of oppositions which tails off, perhaps not inappropriately, into ambiguity and vagueness, Hill
suggests that for Blanchot death is “both extreme possibility and extreme impossibility, finitude and infinity, limit
and limitlessness, experience and anonymity, meaning and meaninglessness” (Hill, Blanchot, 151).
1266
See Maurice Blanchot, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” GO, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981), 99-104;
Maurice Blanchot, “From Dread to Language,” GO, 7.
1267
Even in his discussions of art, Levinas shows little interest in , and less comprehension of, the creative process
itself.
1268
For this reason I refer to the figure we might ordinarily call the narrator as the writer, also recalling that in
Blanchot‟s ontological genealogy (Critchley, Very Little, 45) language is radical, within which original space,
writing emerges as the process – concrete yet evasive – by which we encounter “the pure exteriority, worklessness
and absence towards which inspiration and desire tend” (ibid., 46).
1269
I take conflict to be at the heart of a memorable line close to the work‟s start – “I am almost sure that the words
which should not be written will be written,” (Maurice Blanchot, “Death Sentence,” The Station Hill Blanchot
Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton, ed. George Quasha
(Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999), 131), and those which begin its “metatextual epilogue” (Hill, Blanchot, 145). Hill
notes how this epilogue was removed in the text‟s republication (ibid., 145, 255) – “These pages can end here, and
nothing that follows what I have just written will make me add anything to it or take anything away from it. This
remains, this will remain until the very end” (ibid., 187).
1270
Blanchot, “Death Sentence,” 141-2.
1271
As Fynsk notes, this second death “may not finish anything: her second death is offered only as a citation of the
first” (Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation: ...that there is language (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 248).
1272
See ibid., 250.
1273
Hill, Blanchot, 150.
229
writing to transgress its own medium1274 in a gesture of poietic self-extinction, marked when J. points to
the writer with the words “[n]ow then, take a good look at death.”1275
“Death Sentence” attempts to exemplify that the “language of literature is a search for th[e] moment
which precedes literature.”1276 Fynsk describes Blanchot‟s quest in writing for a “literature [which]
communicates an uncommunicating presence that is not quite self-presence and never quite posits itself
but nevertheless stirs and persists.”1277 To reach for this position, writing needs first to confront “the
materiality of language...the fact that words are things.”1278 Inasmuch as writing affirms in its very
materiality the exact point at which language substitutes itself for the concreteness of whichever entity is
its referent, it equally witnesses in this moment of representation, the fact that this entity is capable of
being annihilated.1279 In this mimetic movement, language binds itself both symbolically and actually to
death.1280 Yet, if the referents of language cease to exist – or if language is deployed to things which do
not exist but which could exist, or could have existed – language does not cease as a force (of
signification). This persistence, a “reawakening of the interminable,”1281 is indicative of the manner in
which Blanchot reaches for the il y a by an argument structurally identical to the one Levinas offers.1282
Fynsk submits that for Blanchot, beside any particular reference, “the persistence of the word as
word...becomes the indication or expression of the il y a...The self-reflection or self-offering of language
becomes the showing of the il y a.”1283
It is certainly accurate to describe this disposition of language as a species of conceptual minimalism: by
a severe self-limitation, language reflexively affirms its status as thing, and so exemplifies a mimetic
economy which is distinctly minimal, since language no longer refers to an external world, but rather to
the self-referential field of poietic force. The force of writing effects “existence without being existence
1274
Hill declares this to be a “narrative of the very limits of narrative” (ibid., 151).
Blanchot, “Death Sentence,” 149.
1276
LRD, 46.
1277
Fynsk, Language and Relation, 233.
1278
LRD, 46. Blanchot goes on: “[a] name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of nonexistence and becomes a
concrete ball, a solid mass of existence…[with] rhythm, weight, mass, shape and then the paper on which one writes
the trail of ink, the book” (ibid.).
1279
Fynsk, Language and Relation, 232.
1280
LRD, 47.
1281
Maurice Blanchot, “Sleep, Night,” The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: U of
Nebraska P, 1982), 267.
1282
TO, 46-7; EE, 51-2. See Fynsk, Language and Relation, 233-4. Hill, however notes divergences regarding the
relation of neutrality to the il y a: Levinas considers the neutrality of Being to be synonymous with its absolute selfidentification, a formulation Blanchot refuses (Hill, Blanchot, 138-9).
1283
Fynsk, Language and Relation, 234-5. This is “[n]ot a language full of images, but a language that has become
the image of language, figuring by this nonreflection the dissimulation of being itself” (ibid., 236).
1275
230
which remains below existence, like an inexorable affirmation without beginning or end – death as the
impossibility of dying.”1284 The second part of “Death Sentence” addresses in somewhat brutal terms, this
relation between poietic effort – in the present context we could perhaps label this the narrative
malconstruction of reality – and the manner in which the inconsistencies and vacuities of literature
obliquely approach the il y a , or what I here term the Real. Close to the end, the writer discovers – with a
horror which is finally directed at his own willing of an amnesic state, the “forgetfulness of things,”1285
since, in fact, he already knows what N. is about to reveal – that she has had her head and hands cast by a
sculptor,1286 consenting to the production of a spectral double, manifested where the poietic act of the
sculptor and her own auto-mimetic desire bisect one another. Of this uncanny proto-mimetic entity,
Blanchot writes: “[a]nd now that thing is over there, you have uncovered it, you have looked at it, and you
have looked into the face of something that will be alive for all eternity, for your eternity and for mine!
Yes, I know it, I know it, I‟ve known it all along.”1287 The Image of N., emptied of all its content yet
charged with presence, marks the manner in which the poietic enterprise simultaneously exceeds its
creator, any prototype to which it may be coordinated, and, finally, itself. It invokes a preconceptual
eternity, and provokes within us the horrifying confrontation of existent with the sheer indifference of
existence.
Blanchot‟s identification of writing as the medium most capable of presenting the il y a1288 is based not on
any particular effective or affective power it possesses – in fact, if anything is clear, it is that writing is
singularly powerless – but on the ease with which its self-reflexivity can be determined and confirmed.1289
What Blanchot tends to ignore, is that any medium through which we might encounter the il y a as datum
is itself already mediated by consciousness. In fact there lies no revelation whatsoever in saying that we
encounter the presence of the il y a in a particular existent, for the il y a is precisely the Real, a minimal
condition for the existence of an entity, prior to and indifferent to the givenness of this entity. The
movement from this banality to the claim that art, and writing in particular, can in fact manifest the il y a
in itself is, as Fynsk notes, “more on the order of a slippage than an argumentation.”1290 Still, it is an
intuition at least partly endorsed by Critchley1291 and Robbins,1292 and the latter‟s claim regarding “an
1284
LRD , 47.
Blanchot, “Death Sentence,” 183.
1286
This is the same sculptor who casts J‟s hands in the first section of the story.
1287
Ibid., 185.
1288
Fynsk, Language and Relation, 236.
1289
It would be problematic, however, to claim that it is solely writing, amongst the various aesthetic fields, which
exhibits this relation to the il y a.
1290
Ibid,, 235.
1291
Critchley, Very Little, 63-5.
1285
231
utter intrication of art and the il y a” is obvious at least as regards the presence of Being in any existent,
but incorrect in assimilating this intrication to the manner in which we are apparently compelled to
approach the il y a in aesthetic terms.1293
d) Aesthetic facticity – disappearance and persistence
Here it is necessary briefly to trace Levinas‟ position on art.1294 Art‟s relation to the existential position
that it is “impossible to die”1295 opens a significant question which, to my mind, is habitually ignored:
what, if anything, lies between hypostasis and the il y a?1296 I agree with Harman‟s assertion that the il y a
“refer[s] not to a special event, but to a permanent and universal feature of reality as a whole,”1297 yet
emphasize amidst this agreement, that we hope in vain actually to encounter the il y a through any
substantive object or thing, for the simple reason that the il y a is a “field of forces.”1298 From Levinas we
have gathered that it is through hypostasis that a subject emerges into a world of things 1299 – that is,
entities unpolarized in Being – by establishing a relation with these things. In a significant sense, this
relation converts these things from mere things into objects.1300 Yet it would be inaccurate to claim that
through this process subjects and objects entirely forsake their fundamental thinghood: this would
demand a decisive scission of thing, object and subject from the il y a – an empty proposition, for the very
fact that anything which is, affirms in the first instant that there is.
Thus, between the hypostatic instant – which indicates the emergence of subjects and objects – and the il
y a – Being as the field of forces indifferent to any particular existent or process – resides the thing. Such
1292
Robbins, Altered Reading, 93, 97-9.
Robbins states that this “intrication is irreducible…because of the seeming necessity for Levinas to employ
numerous literary examples and illustration in his presentation of the il y a and because Levinas‟ very access to the il
y a is via an aesthetic category, the imagination” (ibid., 93). However, this is finally more of a dogmatic statement
regarding such an intrication, than it is a reason explaining it. Robbins makes no distinction here between concept,
cognition, consciousness and imagination, and between these in relation to a material existent, making the error of
collapsing “the unbridgeable gap between being in general and this being in general as experienced” (Harman, Tool
Being, 239).
1294
Admittedly there may be disagreement as to the extent to which Blanchot and Levinas‟ views on the il y a can be
conflated. Here I have understood the former to be an exemplary elaboration of the latter, a view endorsed by
Critchley (Critchley, Very Little, 32) and Fynsk (Fynsk, Language and Relation, 233).
1295
TO, 51.
1296
I propose here the material equivalent of what Levinas refers to as the meanwhile of the time of dying – neither
the forceful self-possession of the subject nor the fully unmediated presence of the il y a (Levinas, “Shadow,” 11-3).
1297
Harman, Tool Being, 240.
1298
TO, 48.
1299
“A subject takes on things” (EE, 69).
1300
Levinas, “Shadow,” 3.
1293
232
a thing marks equally the facticity of the il y a and potential for the taking-place of hypostasis. To the
extent that certain art exhibits a drive towards autonomy1301 in terms of a constitutive resistance to
reduction which would render it a meaningful object at the disposal a subject, it might embody precisely
such an intersticial thing.1302 Art exposes the “very inwardness of things.”1303 Such is the case with much
minimalism, which presents itself in terms of thinghood (for the sake of terminological consistence, we
might prefer to call this objecthood).
Levinas‟ “ontology of art”1304 takes shape in the space opened by Kantian aesthetics, albeit negatively. It
attempts to apprehend art in “what one might call a „non-aesthetic‟ dimension,”1305 in which the sublime
and formlessness exercise ontological precedence over beauty and form. 1306 Not that art cannot consist of
beautiful forms, but these do not constitute its essence, which is discovered in its curious exoticism to the
experience of ordinary existential situations.1307 Hence, Levinas pays particular attention to the abstraction
which characterizes much modern art:1308
[In modern art,] objects attest their power as material objects, even reach a paroxysm of materiality.
Despite the rationality and luminosity of these forms when taken in themselves, a painting makes them
exist in themselves, brings about an absolute existence in the very fact there is something which is not in its
turn an object or a name, which is unnameable and can only appear in poetry. Here is a notion of
materiality as opposed to thought and mind...For here materiality is thickness, coarseness, massivity,
wretchedness. It is what has consistency, weight, is absurd, is a brute but impassive presence; it is also what
is humble, bare and ugly...Behind the luminosity of forms, by which beings already relate to our „inside,‟
1309
matter is the very fact of the [il y a].
1301
Levinas emphasizes that this does not amount, however to endorsing the academic notion of art for art‟s sake
which makes the error of placing art above reality (ibid., 2).
1302
This seems to me implicit in Levinas‟ conception of art outside of objective utility. See ibid., 5; EE, 47.
1303
EE, 49.
1304
Hutchens, Levinas, 141.
1305
Gerald L. Bruns, “The concepts of art and poetry in Emmanuel Levinas‟ writings,” The Cambridge Companion
to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 213.
1306
Levinas, “Shadow,” 8; Edith Wyschogrod, “The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the
Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,” Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for
Philosophy, Literature and Religion, ed. Adrian T. Peperzak (New York and London, Routledge, 1995), 138-9.
1307
EE, 48-9; “Even the most realistic art gives this character of alterity to the objects represented which are
nonetheless part of our world” (EE, 46); Robbins, Altered Reading, 92.
1308
EE, 46-51.
1309
Ibid,. 51.
233
Levinas‟ aesthetics is unusual in its claim that art withdraws from objects what is usually seen as the
prerequisite for their apprehension – form.1310 “Art does not belong to the order of revelation. Nor does it
belong to that of creation,”1311contends Levinas. The latter proposition – one which the present work
disputes – is offered to strengthen the case for the hypostasis of the subject and its encounter with alterity
as world-producing events. The former (regarding revelation) attempts to extract art from its conventional
complicity with an economy of mimesis.1312 Indeed, Levinas insists that art exhibits an “absolute
existence,” a radical materiality with all the “impassive presence” which discloses that which emerges
from behind rather than through the “luminosity of forms” through which reality is represented.
We understand the situation more accurately when we discern that even when art represents the world
faithfully, its manner of augmenting the Real is not mimetic,1313 but rather it returns to objects their
character as things – their radical objecthood which “extracts them from th[eir] belongingness to a
subject.”1314 Art “presents things in their materiality and not as representations.”1315 “Art does not know a
particular type of reality,”1316 Levinas stresses, but, rather, clarifies the “very obscurity of the [R]eal.”1317 I
cannot agree with Levinas that, in its “deconceptualization of reality,”1318 the aesthetic realm should be
conflated with the ineffability of the shadow.1319 This hands the being of art over to the same epistemic
conditions he claims it resolutely opposes.1320 In this respect, I wonder whether the facticity of the il y a –
that there is1321 – does not reveal its indifference rather as overwhelming presence of inexhaustible
potentiality – undirected, perhaps, but not simply oblivious to the objects through which it courses.
Thus, I cannot go so far as to say that art presents the il y a. This is certainly implicit in various remarks
offered by Wall, Bruns, Critchley and Robbins1322 – arguably by Levinas himself.1323 Conflating art and
the il y a in terms of identity – what else could be the basis of such a presentation? – misses that their
proximity is defined by their shared presentation of non-identity, of non-conceptuality, and that this
1310
Wyschogrod, “Art in Ethics,” 138-9.
Levinas, “Shadow,” 3.
1312
It dubious whether Levinas truly accomplishes this.
1313
EE, 46.
1314
Ibid., 45.
1315
Bruns, “Concepts of art,” 211.
1316
Levinas, “Shadow,” 3.
1317
Ibid.
1318
Ibid., 4.
1319
Levinas, “Shadow,” 6, 8-9, 11.
1320
Ibid., 10.
1321
EE, 3-4, 8; TO, 46, 53; Wall, Radical Passivity 28-30.
1322
Ibid., 28; Bruns, “Concepts of art,” 212, 215; Robbins, Altered Reading , 93.
1323
Levinas, “Shadow,” 11.
1311
234
proximity is sufficient. This mode of presentation Levinas identifies in terms of the image: the existential
residue from the passage of pure Being into existence, yet which transgresses the identitarian limits of
both subject and object as they arise through hypostasis. While the “phenomenology of images insists on
their transparency,”1324 they do not merely “point [...] towards objects; instead, images are the doubles of
objects, resemble them, in the sense that shadows resemble things.”1325 In this manner, an image acts as
an “allegory of being.”1326 Art offers the image “in place of the object itself”1327 as well as of concepts1328
– as a “disincarnation of reality,”1329 at once extracted from the ordinary flux of temporal passage, 1330
while simultaneously exemplifying the facticity of the Real (that there is). The image appears by a force
of resemblance, which is the process by which art transfigures1331 the ordinary qualities, properties and
likenesses of its objects into existential quantities in which “the very existing of a being, is doubled up
with a semblance of existing.”1332 Through the image, which “neither yields the object nor replicates it in
an ontological sense,”1333 we encounter art in its ambiguity: it both disengages from and draws us into an
altered
relation
“communicativity”
with
1336
Being;1334
its
existence
exemplifies
fixity
without
stability1335
and
without a particular message.
Returning to Blanchot‟s “Death Sentence,” it is at this point clearer all that is at stake in the image,
spectral but Real, of the plaster casting of J. and N. Here is a situation where art exemplifies the il y a.
Neither subject nor being qua being, art “places in parenthesis the fugivity of the Real,”1337 evoking the
intersticial time of dying, the image of which appears between the existent and its existence. Art testifies
that there is – to the facticity of the il y a or the Real. The more minimal its aesthetic, the more
transparently we apprehend the lacuna which, as Agamben argues, is situated at the centre of any act of
testimony. Like Blanchot, Beckett thematizes our relationship to the Real in terms of death and the nearly
intolerable tension between the shocking ease with which death strikes living entities and the inability of
consciousness to master finitude. Characters are habitually reduced to their most rudimentary modes of
1324
Ibid., 5.
Wyschogrod, “Art in Ethics,” 139.
1326
Levinas, “Shadow,” 6.
1327
EE, 45.
1328
Wall, Radical Passivity, 26.
1329
Levinas, “Shadow,” 5.
1330
Ibid., 6, 9-11; Wyschogrod, “Art in Ethics,” 139.
1331
Danto, Transfiguration, 168.
1332
Levinas, “Shadow,” 8. See ibid., 6.
1333
Wyschogrod, 139.
1334
Levinas, “Shadows,” 12; EE, 46-7,
1335
Levinas, “Shadow,” 10.
1336
Wall, Radical Passivity, 9.
1337
Ibid., 21.
1325
235
existence – to inert bodies merely occupying space, barely capable of movement; to disembodied
instances of self-reflexive thought, proverbial figments of their own imagination; to voices and visions
struggling through their sensory being against the inescapability of the raw facticity of their existence.1338
Exemplary in this respect is “Rockaby,” Beckett‟s short dramatic work in which a “[p]remature old”1339
woman in a rocking-chair interacts with her own voice – a recording, presumably intended to be the
product of her imagination – rehearsing, perhaps even negotiating, her death in an “essential, minimalist
poem.”1340 The relationship of the embodied voice to its disembodied counterpart is rather ambiguous. It
is uncertain whether the utterance, “More”1341 – with which the embodied woman punctuates the text,
each time setting in motion the mechanical movement of the chair1342 and the recitation, by her uncanny
double, of the eventless solitude of her existence – is offered as supplication or instruction, whether it is
intended to provoke pathos or resignation. The occasional convergence of the two voices, which chant
together “time she stopped,”1343 only reinforce the disparity with which any conscious act relates to its
own disappearance – a gulf, of which death is the emblem, skilfully woven from a monologue of
incremental repetition which competes with the best visual and musical minimalism.1344 Precisely through
the minimalism of this work we encounter existential persistence at its most quantitative: the call for more
of Being.
The woman becomes increasingly dependent on this vocalic spectre,1345 the technologically mediated
condensation of her imagination and memory, and we become acutely aware that her refrain, more,
paradoxically marks a progressive existential lessness.1346 Increasingly reliant on its disembodied double,
any remaining immanence fades to a bleak point in the work‟s final lines:
1338
In order, we might consider the example of “Fizzle 5” (Samuel Beckett, “Fizzle 5,” The Complete Short Prose:
1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995) 236-7); “Imagination Dead Imagine” (Samuel Beckett,
“Imagination Dead Imagine,” CSP, 182-5); and “Not I” (Samuel Beckett, “Not I,” CDW, 373-83).
1339
Samuel Beckett, “Rockaby,” CDW, 433.
1340
Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 485.
1341
Beckett, “Rockaby,” 435, 436, 438, 440.
1342
The woman herself is motionless, her feet on a footrest, and she exercises no physical force to set the chair in
motion (ibid., 433-4).
1343
Ibid., 436, 437, 439, 440.
1344
I think here specifically of the early keyboard composition of Philip Glass (Philip Glass, Music in Similar
Motion, 1969; Philip Glass, Contrary Motion, 1974), the serial sculpture of Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd‟s serial
rectangular reliefs.
1345
See Connor, Samuel Beckett, 129, 131, 133.
1346
Ibid., 134.
236
fuck life
stop her eyes
rock her off
rock her off
[Together: echo of „rock her off,‟ coming to rest of rock, slow fade out.] 1347
The woman dies – at least, this is suggested by the slow inclination of her head at the close of the work1348
– but, unsurprisingly, death is not a simple accomplishment here.1349 Subjectivity, as in most of Beckett‟s
work, is forwarded only indirectly and through a veil of ambiguities and rhetorical failures, through the
ruptured relations of the text between its internal coherence, the immediacy of its physical
performance,1350 and the mediatory role it adopts between playwright and audience, and, most
significantly, through its technological mediation. If, as Agamben argues, vocality mediates between
being qua being and human existence, then this art – which, in the technological abstraction of the voice
from the body imposes such a forceful field of containment upon subjectivity – exposes precisely the nonconceptual topoi to which the work of Agamben and Levinas similarly allude in terms of a nothingness
which evades nihilation.
That technological reproduction might be more effective in prescribing reality – this is certainly a
possible implication of the expiry of this woman at the instigation of her disembodied voice – and,
moreover, in describing the Real, remains an unsettling proposition.1351 As unambiguously concrete as it
is symbolic, Beckett points to a situation which exceeds human subjectivity – a time of dying which is the
“possibility of a future without me, an infinite future, a future which is not my future.”1352 This work also
clarifies the proximity of the aesthetic relation of the facticity of the il y a – that there is – to minimalism:
both take shape along a trajectory of reductionism, abstraction and rarefication which is easily mistaken
for pure absence, nothingness and the void. Aesthetic and existential minimalism similarly evoke a
profound recognition: that in the pursuit of minimum we are returned to that which is most Real – the
taking-place of entities.
1347
Beckett, Rockaby, 442.
Ibid., 433.
1349
As Connor notes, the “tape seems to be caught in a series of self-recalling loops, each tending towards an end,
but also stimulating an apparently infinite series of delays for recapitulation” (Connor, Samuel Beckett , 134).
1350
See ibid., 128, 130, 159-60; Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2009), 84.
1351
On this power of technology, we might recall how in Krapp’s Last Tape the consistency and authenticity is
similarly granted by recordings of the voice to the failing reflexive identification of the subject.
1352
Critchley, Very Little, 75.
1348
237
In A Zed and Two Noughts,1353 amongst Peter Greenaway‟s most theoretically demanding films, the
balance of negativity and positivity in such taking-place is meticulously interrogated. Exploring the
intersection of mythology, science and art, the film centres on the attempts of two brothers, Oliver and
Oswald – scientists at a zoo – to explain and mourn the death of their wives in a car accident by pseudoscientific means. Oliver becomes obsessed with the moment at which being passes into existence,
repeatedly watching a “pseudo-BBC film series called Life on Earth,”1354 while Oswald, using time-lapse
photography, begins to document the process of decay itself. Having revealed to Alba, their lover
(separately and together),1355 that they were born joined at the hip, the physical appearance of Oliver and
Oswald becomes increasingly indistinct, and their project becomes a “cinema poised...at the exact
moment between life and death.”1356 The film attempts to grasp the point of death by recasting postmortem existence itself as a type of life – a time of dying.
Their documentation of decomposition appropriates Darwinian taxonomy in an “evolution of death”1357
which begins with a rotting apple and progresses through the decay of a prawn, angelfish, a crocodile, a
swan, a dog, and a zebra. Using stop-motion photography, they break this process down to its most
minimal elements – the image of an instant, but a dead instant, a potent aesthetic reflection of the tension
between hypostasis and the il y a if ever there were one. Rapidly played in sequence, these narrate an
alterior life – a life-of-death – “stop-motion allows us to see changes that would be imperceptible in real
time...Applied to nature, this process has a pronounced alienation [sic] effect. Corpses act out a macabre
„living‟ death, one that seems grotesquely unnatural”1358 as they bloat, shrink, are consumed and rot to
nothingness. Here the resonance with Rancière‟s identification of the sentence-image in cinema is clear,
as we witness the “change of regime between two sensory orders,”1359 by which conventional narrative
logic is disrupted by the image, but yet subject to the ungainly sequencing of a “paratactic syntax.” 1360
Rather terrifyingly, this cinema adopts a deadly work of its own, its completion “demand[ing] fresh
bodies in order to construct a climax and a kind of closure.”1361 This culminates in the brothers‟ attempt to
capture their joint suicide and decomposition by the same technology through which they endeavoured to
1353
Peter Greenaway, A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985.
Amy Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 93.
1355
Alba loses a leg in the same accident that kills the wives of Oliver and Oswald, and is pivotal in exposing the
film‟s principal themes as intersections of taxonomy, medical science, mathematics, art, belonging, sex, procreation,
loss, death and decay.
1356
Lawrence, Greenaway, 97.
1357
Ibid., 93.
1358
Ibid., 95.
1359
Rancière, Future, 46.
1360
Ibid., 48.
1361
Lawrence, Greenaway, 95.
1354
238
arrest the essence of persistence from decay. This plan is thwarted when their bodies and equipment are
overwhelmed by snails – they execute their plan on Alba‟s aptly named country estate, L’escargot –
causing the latter to break down. We are brought to the disheartening realization that all the effort of
science and art is finally for nought.
Given the complexity of Greenaway‟s vision, it is perhaps surprising how many elements of aesthetic
minimalism are discernible in A Zed and Two Noughts. Apart from the use of serial repetition in the stopmotion photography – which, as noted, ties together aesthetic reductionism and physical decay –
Greenaway often uses his screen as a canvas on which to rehearse chromatic relationships, particularly
between black and white,1362 but also primary colours1363and the fundamental visual processes of casting
light and shadow.1364 An interesting formalism is discernible in key images of the film, perhaps most
notably in the blue neon sign of the opening scene (Figure 74) – zoo, literally a zed and two noughts – and
which fades, letter by letter, as Oliver kneels, weeping, on the street where the fatal accident occurred.
Figure 74: Still from opening of A Zed and Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway, 1985.
1362
For example, the prostitute, Venus de Milo, always appears in black and white.
The images above from the opening sequence show, from left to right, the blue of the zoo‟s sign, the yellow of
the Esso advertisement, and the red of the hazard warning tape.
1364
Near the film‟s start, we encounter (recalling Vermeer) the dazzling illumination of van Meegeren‟s operating
theatre from the glass rear wall as an automated blind rises, (Clip 2; Peter Greenaway, “Surgery scence,” A Zed and
Two Noughts, 1985), while towards its end, as the camera zooms out at the close of the scene in which the brothers
are confronted in their laboratory by the shadowy van Hoyten, the darkness paradoxically revealed by the irregular,
intermittent rhythm of camera flashes which are documenting the various processes of decomposition in progress,
condenses all the uncaniness of the film‟s subject (Clip 3 Peter Greenaway, “Time-lapse lab scene,” A Zed and Two
Noughts, 1985.
1363
239
Here we discover the spectrum of the film‟s concerns condensed into a single vanishing image. It evokes
the physical space of the zoo in which “the artificial, arbitrary bringing together of incompatible
species”1365 takes place. This arbitrariness is what makes taxonomy necessary, and the several systems to
which the film appeals converge in the letter zed: alphabetic ordering, the zenith of the Darwinian ascent
(albeit the decaying zebra is surpassed in the progressive animalization of the human body). The fading of
the zed (Figure 75) foreshadows the inability of these systems to stabilise order, or to offer satisfactory
connection of decay to loss and grief, and the two brothers – the two noughts, OO, Oliver and Oswald1366
– are left without consolation.
1365
1366
Lawrence, Greenaway, 92.
Ibid., 79.
240
Figure 75:Sequence of two stills from opening of Zed and Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway, 1985.
241
The disappearance of the second nought, reduces the conceptual cinematic topos to the single O (Figure
76). Visually, this distinctly recalls the light art of Dan Flavin or Olafur Eliasson, and the sculpture of
Ronald Bladen. This solitary nought installs zero as an existential target of sorts – the absence to which
all existence seems to tend. At the same time, however, we are reminded that the nothingness which we
might associate with death or disappearance is not void: we witness that the progress of decay installs
another, uncanny, second life – a life without consciousness, but which is still marked by physical process
and effect.
Figure 76: Sequence of stills from Peter Greenaway, A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985).
242
e) The argument regarding minimalism and perception
The point at which this final O disappears (Figure 76) marks not nothingness, but the minimal distinction
of the static instant from the passage of time. This is not only evident from Greenaway‟s use of stopmotion animation, but is also implicit in the soundtrack for the film composed by minimalist Michael
Nyman. As indissociable as Greenaway‟s images might be from Nyman‟s memorable melodies, the
genesis of this music usually occurs independently, with minimal initial reference to visual themes. 1367
Yet there exists a rare synergy in this work which draws into a provocative proximity the significant
temporal, existential and scientific concerns exposed above, and an aesthetic field upon which the lucid,
formalist austerity of minimalism meets the opulent formality of the Baroque.1368 This is clearly audible in
“Time Lapse,” (Track 22),1369 the composition which accompanies the opening sequence cited above as
well as many of the laboratory scenes. Its rhythmic, repeated chords make clear reference to the
predilection for homophonic texture which characterizes several musical genres of the Baroque1370 – here
Nyman draws on a “Dies Irae” of Heinrich Biber1371 – and well complements scenes which exploit the
regular punctuation of stop-motion photography,1372 offering in its vigorous yet stately pulse a
counterpoint to Greenaway‟s uncanny evocation of decay as a time of dying.
Indeed, a surprisingly productive field of comparison exists between minimalism and the Baroque, the
exploration of which has tended to distinguish between their formal similarities, their reception and
consumption as cultural products, and their affective consonances. From a formalist perspective, there are
certainly legitimate points of contact. In the first instance, minimalist and Baroque music are comparable
in their use of sequences, or repeated patterns – harmonic, melodic or rhythmic – which, through their
repetitions and variations, are a principal structuring force of the music. Both are also concerned with
rendering the compositional process transparent.1373 This could not be more unambiguously presented
than in Glass‟ “Floe,” (Track 23),1374 which patiently states and then combines each element of its ecstatic
content most conspicuously. Responding respectively to the exaggerated complexity of late Renaissance
1367
Pwyll ap Siȏn, The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate:
2007), 81, 85-6.
1368
Ibid., 81, 88, 92, 95-103.
1369
Michael Nyman, “Time Lapse,” The Essential Michael Nyman Band. Argo, 1992.
1370
This fact is often overlooked by those who mistakenly equate baroque composition with contrapuntal invention,
which represents only one area of its remarkably embracing and experimental creative spirit. Almost all vocal music
is predominantly homophonic, and most orchestral and chamber work incorporates homophonic sections.
1371
Ibid., 101.
1372
Ibid., 102.
1373
See Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 184-6.
1374
Philip Glass, “Floe,” Glassworks. CBS, 1982.
243
polyphony and the serialism developed by the Second Viennese school and their successors,1375 Baroque
and minimalist composition sought to reanimate the most fundamental material from which harmony and
harmonic progression are derived. The basso ostinato, or ground bass, in baroque music – a repeated bass
motif which outlines cyclical patterns of harmonic movement1376 – finds close parallels in minimalism. 1377
More recognizable, still, is the presence of melodic sequences, isorhythms 1378 and the extensive use of
arpeggiated lines.1379 We might only compare a celebrated passage from the opening movement of
Vivaldi‟s La Primavera concerto (Track 24)1380 to one from Glass‟ “Knee-Play 2” from Einstein on the
Beach (Track 25)1381 to adduce this proximity. The arpeggio offers a suitable vehicle for the simultaneous
exposition of harmonic and melodic material, and while we exercise just caution in resisting, with Fink,
the equation of minimalism and baroque music through any one such vehicle – stylistic marker,
theoretical principal, or compositional process1382 – we do equally well in recalling that the search for
aesthetic novelty often begins with a sustained re-examination of aesthetic foundations.
By definition, any radical aesthetic proposition revisits the possibility of defining its own essence. In this
sense every aesthetic period exposes some sort of minimalism – doubtless one could contend that the
sparseness and transparency which characterizes late eighteenth century classicism is somewhat minimal.
However, where classicism‟s innovations are clarified by the manner in which material is coordinated by
hierarchical forms and structures, those of the baroque are apprehended in the very midst of process and
procedure. Taking seriously Reich‟s proposition that the minimal heart of music is located in the very
production of its constituent sounds,1383 we might note similarly that it is through the performance of
baroque music that one becomes a witness to the intimate process by which transparent simplicity and
opaque complexity are held together, generating in their dialectic interplay a dynamic sonic field from
1375
Ben Yarmolinksy, “Minimalism and the Baroque,” Perceptible Processes: Minimalism and the Baroque, ed.
Claudia Swan (New York: Eos, 1997), 61.
1376
Siȏn, Music of Nyman, 95-6.
1377
Yarmolinksy disputes that the ground bass may be interpreted as a proto-minimalist device (Yarmolinksy,
“Minimalism and Baroque,” 66). To address this, we might compare Purcell‟s use of the ground bass in Dido‟s
famous lament to the descending line of Glass‟ “Knee Plays” in Einstein on the Beach. Purcell is one of Nyman‟s
principal inspirateurs – the latter frequently quoting the former‟s work – while Reich acknowledges the influence of
Bach (Steve Reich, “Texture, Space, Survival,” Writings on Music, 140 (139-144); Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 1712).
1378
Isorhythms are identical rhythmic patterns or proportions repeated to strengthen a sense of musical unity.
1379
Jonathan Sheffer, “Foreword,” Perceptible Processes: Minimalism and the Baroque, ed. Claudia Swan (New
York: Eos, 1997), iv (i-v).
1380
Antonio Vivaldi, “Allegro,” Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8/RV 269, 1725.
1381
Philip Glass, “Knee-Play 2,” Einstein on the Beach. Nonesuch, 1993.
1382
Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 170-1.
1383
“The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound)
details and the overall form simultaneously” (Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” Writings on Music, 34).
244
which music takes its shape. Both monodic immediacy and intricate polyphony reach back to the very
radical taking-place of a sonic entity in terms of its melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, dynamic and timbrel
elements. Harmony and melody constitute one another in a single musical occurrence. We search
patiently for that elusive point at which sound reveals itself as music: between will and body, inhalation
and exhalation; between presence and absence, existence and nothingness – between hypostasis and the il
y a.
Fink downplays such speculative thought. “Seeing a link between minimalism and Baroque music does
not mean casting back two centuries for some elusive tonal essence the two styles share,” 1384 he claims.
He contends that we look instead to music‟s “societal function”1385 and how music is consumed1386 to
explain such proximities. Rather than insisting on a transhistorical analysis of consumption – noting,
comparing and decoding types of consumer and consumption of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
on the one hand, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on the other – Fink suggests that the early
postmodern pattern of consumption itself produces the proximity of minimalism and the Baroque in the
sense that it is this “new culture of repetitive listening”1387 which conditions our perception of
resemblances in the first instance. That “the infancy of...[minimalism] was saturated in the actual material
sound of a commercially driven technological transformation of [Baroque music]”1388 is itself a
contentious claim.1389 Accepting the popularity of the so-called barococo revival and its inextricability
from technologies of mass-dissemination which shape reception1390 still leaves us at a considerable
distance from affirming Fink‟s somewhat conservative uncoupling of production and reception,
separating an impeccably educated composing elite from an apparently pedestrian and undiscerning
listener-consumer.
Nonetheless, Fink‟s analysis of minimalism in terms of its status as commodity – its rise within a climate
of accelerated capitalism marked by the symmetrical expansion of a culture of consumption and the
consumption of culture1391 – is one of considerable value. In his work we discover an important variation
on similar insights reached by Kenneth Baker, who stresses in minimalism‟s emergence “the broad
1384
Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 171.
Ibid., 172.
1386
Ibid.
1387
Ibid., 174.
1388
Ibid., 171.
1389
“Barococo was not training listeners for Beethoven; it was training them for minimalism” (ibid., 182). This
seems to me a view of cultural consumption at once somewhat exaggerated and inflexible.
1390
Ibid., 180-1.
1391
Foster, Return, 60-62, 66, 107-115.
1385
245
background of American mass production,” in which artists “responded to the cynical superabundance of
industry by using its services to produce objects calculatedly unlike what the cornucopia of mass
production disgorges,”1392 and Hal Foster, who contends that “[m]inimalism and pop often approximated
a serial mode of production that related them like no previous art to our systematic world of commodities
and images. With this serial mode of production came a different mode of consumption.”1393 Meyer
provides considerable insight to the “„culture sell‟”1394 fashion, design, advertising and journalism achieve
by coupling themselves to the minimalist avant-garde of the 1960s – “the logic of Novelty was the logic
of consumption”1395 – and Strickland,1396 Chave1397 and Mertens1398 offer similar observations within a
broadly materialist critique of cultural economy.
The danger of excessively labouring the point regarding minimalism‟s socio-economic moorings resides
in the potential suppression of its aesthetic features. We easily miss that the principal means of
recognizing resemblance resides in aesthetic perception itself, upon which minimalism places novel and
paradoxical demands.1399 Minimalism seems to harness the very force of the concept in exposing the
immanence of its media and their relation to sensation and perception:1400 neither obtains absolute
primacy, and an attempt to isolate one always returns us to the other, alternating between „intellect as
determinative dimension...[and] the observer‟s bodily awareness as the standpoint from which he must
construe an artwork‟s rationale and his own role in determining what he sees.”1401 The immanence which
minimalism attempts to evoke in terms of “some sort of presence or concrete thereness”1402 in its objects,
abandons transcendence to a radical taking-place of matter.1403
1392
Baker, Minimalism, 9.
Foster, Return, 108. In particular, Foster draws attention to the reconsideration of value prompted by an art of
objecthood: aesthetic, use and exchange value transform and potentially negate one another depending on their
mode and context of presentation (ibid., 111-2). See ibid., 60-62, 66, 107-115.
1394
Meyer, Minimalism, 29.
1395
Ibid., 215. See also ibid., 8-9; 25, 28-9. More hesitantly, we might note, with Foster, that “the avant-garde
mimes the degraded world of capitalist modernity in order not to embrace it but to mock it” (Foster, Return, 15-6).
1396
Strickland, Minimalism, 1-2, 9.
1397
Chave, Minimalism and Rhetoric, 26.
1398
Mertens suggests that minimalism might be understood within a libidinal economy (following Lyotard) which
opposes the strictly dialectic understanding of historical capitalism (Mertens, American Minimal Music, 116-120).
1399
Foster, Return, 50.
1400
Foster construes the principal dialectic movement in minimalism – between conception and perception – in
terms of an “embrace of structuralism” (ibid., 62) as opposed to “enthusiasm for phenomenology” (ibid.).
1401
Baker, Minimalism, 10.
1402
Rose, “ABC,” 291.
1403
Ibid.; Foster, 36-7.
1393
246
Donald Judd‟s contention is that minimalism manifests in terms of specific objects.1404 Each of these is a
unified quantity, a “thing as a whole”1405 which is determined not by any internal or external relation of
particular parts, but by the fact that it is expressly indifferent to resemblance, representation or illusion.1406
The media or materials in which such an object consists are “simply materials,”1407 and it is by this
minimal being that “[t]hey are specific.”1408 Claiming that “[a] work needs only to be interesting,” 1409
Judd installs interest as the correlate of specificity, and an experiential cipher for the displacement which
minimalism effects within traditional aesthetics. Not only is Kantian disinterestedness decentred by a
concern with aesthetic intensity, presence or immanence, but many minimalists sought to circumvent the
view that their aesthetic work involves reflective judgment at all. To recall Kant, reflective judgment
defines the aesthetic situation in which our encounter with particular sensory data is normalized by the
submission of this data to concepts. These concepts allow us to “ascend from the particular in nature to
the universal,”1410 so that, finally, aesthetic experience as it is encountered in a particular object
presupposes the potential subjugation of its aesthetic qualities to concepts.1411 By contrast, Judd‟s idea of
specific objects demarcates aesthetic entities which themselves claim universality inasmuch as they are
absolutely singular in their stark nonconceptuality. Thus they are interesting without commanding our
obeisance to a transcendental principle.
In the celebrated essay, “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried takes an extremely forceful line against
such minimalism – or literalist art,1412 as he terms it – claiming that on the basis of its overly literal
understanding of its vocation simply to exist, it negates conviction regarding art‟s historicity, substituting
for the modernist “transcendental „presentness‟ of art...the mundane „presence‟ of things.”1413 Aesthetic
perception appeals to a sense of “[e]ndlessness, being able to go on and on, even having to go on and
on”1414 – the “temporality of perception,”1415 or “duration of the experience.”1416 It is this reduction of art
1404
Although in “Specific Objects” Judd makes no mention of his own three-dimensional work, it is nonetheless
exemplary with regard to the paradigm he exposes. Foster refers to this essay as his manifesto (Foster, Return, 3).
1405
Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax and New York: Nova Scotia School of
Art and Design, 1975), 187.
1406
Ibid., 184.
1407
Ibid., 187.
1408
Ibid.
1409
Ibid., 184.
1410
Kant, Judgment, 19.
1411
Ibid., 18-9.
1412
In this essay Fried prefers the term literalism to minimalism (ibid., 117).
1413
Foster, Return, 51.
1414
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 143. “[T]he beholder is made aware of the endlessness and inexhaustibility if not
of the object itself at any rate of his experience of it (ibid., 140).
1415
Foster, Return, 40.
247
to “a mundane time”1417 which Fried views as antithetical to the advancements of modernity.1418 Such art
functions by a sort of theatricality which divests it of any specific force by allowing the aesthetic object to
drift, apparently “inexhaustibly,”1419 between pure sensation and structuring perception on the one hand,
and, on the other, generic conventions and aesthetic disciplines.1420 Such inexhaustibility owes not to “any
fullness [within the object]...but because there is nothing there to exhaust.” 1421 In this sense, the
theatricality which Fried places at the centre of minimalism – “the production of objects designed
exclusively to produce a response”1422 – suggests a hollow aesthetic sensibility. Theatrical objects claim
as their own a sheer presence which, in fact, is coerced from the perceiver in the form of an anonymous
but irremissible aesthetic awareness.1423 Theatricality obscures the epiphanic promise that aesthetic
modernism sought to conserve: that “[p]resentness is grace;”1424 that externality and autonomy in their
intricacy are inextricable from the possibility of freedom.1425
Minimalism understood thus deflects aesthetic integrity from the object to the vicissitudes of aesthetic
perception as experienced by an embodied subject, while simultaneously transforming this subject from a
simple viewer to a beholder.1426 “The objects exists on its own all right; what depends on the beholder is
only the experience,”1427 notes Walter Benn Michaels in his assessment of Fried‟s argument. “But, of
course, the experience is everything – it is the experience instead of the object that Minimalism
values.”1428 The beholder performs a constructive role inasmuch as the objects of canonical minimalism
are dependent on perception for their integrity; yet the beholder is simultaneously rendered passive, even
impotent, as he is able neither to ignore nor fully to apprehend the work in its sheer quantity.1429 In short,
minimalism requires a new mode of perception: “to discover and project objecthood as such,” 1430 it must
1416
Ibid., 145.
Foster, Return, 52. See ibid., 40-1.
1418
Fried, 145-7; also ibid., 125, 142.
1419
Ibid., 144.
1420
Ibid., 141-2.
1421
Ibid., 140.
1422
Michaels, Shape, 89.
1423
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 127-9.
1424
Ibid., 147.
1425
Michaels, Shape, 88; Foster, Return, 41-2.
1426
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 140-4.
1427
Michaels, Shape, 89.
1428
Ibid.
1429
See Fried., 140.
1430
Ibid., 120.
1417
248
recast itself as “an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder,”1431 and,
finally, “belongs to the beholder.”1432
For Robert Morris,1433 despite the ill-fated search for an absolute artwork – a work which would be
constituted by a single quality or a single part1434 – minimalism diligently generates unitary forms (Figure
77).1435 These are “bound together...with a kind of energy provided by the gestalt...in such a way that they
offer a maximum resistance to perceptual separation,”1436 eschewing the relation of any internal parts, as
well as the possible reduction of their singularity to any quality which could be determined from a
position of externality, or a relation to other objects.1437 Thus, as Berger observes of Morris‟ L-Beams,
“while the logic of the form‟s uniformity is understood, the visual inconsistency of their positioning
precludes seeing them as the same.”1438 Remarkably, the unitary form remains indifferent – “neutral and
austere” – even as it draws the beholder into an active perceptual relation by the sense of presence its
scale commands, a bodily relation more usually reserved for our interaction with other people.1439
Every unitary form coheres qua its own paradigmatic exposition1440 – its production of, and manifestation
within, the para-ontological sphere1441 of its own intelligibility;1442 an imbrication of the self-reflexivity
and reflective judgment which confirm the facticity of the work persisting as it is within the Real.
Likewise, we might recognize in Morris‟ position the aesthetic paraphrase of what Badiou grasps
ontologically when, accepting the fundamental axiom that the One is not, that which seems to be One,
1431
Ibid., 125.
Ibid.
1433
Robert Morris – along with Judd, Le Witt and Stella – is one of the first generation of minimalist visual artists
whose theoretical position is held almost in as high regard as his creative work.
1434
Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” 226.
1435
Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1965-7. Whitney Museum, New York.
1436
Ibid., 225-6.
1437
Ibid., 225.
1438
Berger, Labyrinths, 54.
1439
Ibid., 49-56.
1440
Agamben, “Paradigm,” 23, 30-1.
1441
We might schematize the manner in which the integrity of a phenomenon is guaranteed simultaneously by
conception and perception, when we note that in determining the most proper part of an entity, it is as though
internality and externality simultaneously turn back on themselves and upon one another: the most intimate part of
the phenomenon is manifested beside (para ) itself, and the externality we perceive of an object, in fact, contains the
essence of what we cannot master through any act of perception or conception. Along with Agamben, we
denominate this in terms of a “paradigmatic ontology” (ibid., 32) or para-ontological sphere (Giorgio Agamben,
What
is
a
Paradigm?:
A
Lecture
by
Giorgio
Agamben,
20
November
2011.
<http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-what-is-a-paradigm-2002.html>.
1442
Agamben, “Paradigm,” 24.
1432
249
must, in fact, be multiple. The unitary form is an aesthetic analogue for that which by its resistant
engagement with perception is counted-as-One.
Figure 77: Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1965-7.
Returning to the question of presence, Foster maintains that minimalism is best comprehended in
epistemological terms1443 – in his estimation its aesthetic sphere is defined by a self-reflexivity concerned
with the conditions of its perception and intelligibility. I incline towards the proposition that minimalist
presence is the para-ontological condition by which its objects exemplify their relation to the Real. By
analogy, we might recall the manner in which Aristotelian categories simultaneously delineate and retain
ontology, and ask whether minimalism might not be interpreted as a homological mirror – an oblique
return to ontology offered by restraining epistemology by the very terms it values most? “[A] brute but
1443
While I take Foster‟s point, the qualifications offered seem insufficient to make a final judgment regarding
minimalism‟s commitment to its epistemological dimension. In deciding in this regard, we might recall the manner
in which Aristotelian categories are forwarded to restrain ontology, although themselves presented in ontological
terms. Might minimalism be interpreted as an oblique return to ontology offered by restraining epistemology by the
very terms it values most?
250
impassive presence,”1444 Levinas reminds us, is the pivot of the existential understanding of Being itself.
By the persistence of its emphasis on presence, minimalism exhibits its passion for the Real (adapting
Badiou‟s phrase)1445 – a reflexive exemplification of the “relationship art entertains with the real, or what
the real of art is.”1446Exposing this relationship, art must come to “exhibit its own process...[and] to
visibly idealize its own materiality;”1447 to generate by its “erasure of every content”1448 the destruction
neither of quality nor of meaning as such, but the recognition of their supplementarity to what of every
quantity is Real.1449 In this way it subtracts from its own material1450 the “minimal difference”1451 between
the proper place of an entity and its taking-place, between its pure presence and the representation of
presence.1452
We discover in this minimal difference the ontological elaboration of Foster‟s claim that, “[a]s an analysis
of perception, minimalism prepared a further analysis of the conditions of perception.”1453 Dan Flavin‟s
installation at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is remarkable in this respect (Figure 78).1454 A prime
example of the transumptive logic of much minimalism, defining the proper topos of this work proves
exceedingly tricky. Its constituents are distributed between several locations and dislocations, material
objects and the organs and processes of perception: the iridescent material which each fluorescent fixture
contains; the electricity which triggers the chemical reactions responsible for the luminescence of these
fixtures; the actual light which the fixtures emit; the manner in which this light is apprehended, processed
and transformed by the sensory and associated apparatus of our bodies; the materiality of the fixtures
themselves, their way of occupying space and relating to the architecture of the hall – reflected, deflected
1444
EE, 51.
It should be noted that Badiou uses the example of Malevich‟s White on White, a well-known suprematist work
which is noteworthy for its exploration of “the abstract difference of ground and form, and, above all, the null
difference between white and white, the difference of the Same – what we could call the vanishing difference”
(Badiou, Century, 55).
1446
Ibid.
1447
Ibid., 50.
1448
Ibid., 55.
1449
Here Foster‟s pertinent observation is useful, that “the stake of minimalism is the nature of meaning and the
status of the subject, both of which are held to be public, not private, produced in a physical interface with the actual
world” (Foster, Return, 40).
1450
Importantly, this takes place by a “construction” rather than a deduction: it is both “differential and
differentiating” (Badiou, Century, 56).
1451
Ibid., 55
1452
Ibid.
1453
Foster, Return, 59.
1454
Dan Flavin, untitled, 1996. Hamburger Banhoff, Berlin. Flavin‟s work is discussed in greater detail
subsequently.
1445
251
and limited by floors, walls, pillars, arches, windows and the ceiling; and finally from the perspective of a
passer-by to whom the entire building might become a work of light art (Figure 79).1455
Figure 78: Dan Flavin - untitled (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), 1996. Interior view.
Figure 79: Dan Flavin - untitled (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), 1996. Exterior view.
1455
Ibid.
252
That “perceptual presence”1456 is distributed in such a way has led numerous minimalists to a brand of
phenomenology loosely sympathetic to Maurice Merleau-Ponty‟s central proposition: that perception is a
dynamic and constructive process,1457 a practical synthesis of “lived-through correspondences”1458 of
sensory data and sensation which our embodied existence actively generates. 1459 Perception is the
“original text”1460 which donates purposiveness to reality by indicating “a direction rather than a primitive
function”1461 which conditions the interaction of a body with entities of the world by which it is
surrounded, each of which has a particular existential style.1462 In the process by which perception stylizes
reality,1463 art is of particular significance to Merleau-Ponty since, “[w]ith all its sensuous means, it is art
which gives this dimension [of embodied perception] its fullest expression.”1464 If “elementary perception
is already charged with a meaning,”1465 how much more so might the specialized aesthetic perception be
which exposes the full intensity of a specific medium? Recognizing that “no language ever wholly frees
itself from the precariousness of mute forms of expression,”1466 those of art nonetheless remain
remarkable for the manner in which they intensify perception by the imbrication of the body with a
particular medium.
The autopoietic definition of biological systems is instructive here, and fundamental to all living systems
and those which operate homologically. “A creature endowed with a central nervous system must succeed
in externalizing and constructing an outside world before it can begin to articulate self-reference on the
basis of its own bodily perceptions…perhaps by a sort of transcribing of the brain‟s “double closure” into
an inside/outside distinction within consciousness,”1467 according to Luhmann. In this light, Merleau-
1456
Foster, Return, 60.
Merleau-Ponty faults the empiricist notions that “attention creates nothing” (PP, 28), asserting instead that “to
pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them”
(ibid., 30).
1458
Ibid., 204.
1459
In a renowned formulation, Merleau-Ponty suggests that “the theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory
of perception” (PP, 206); Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 42.
1460
PP, 21.
1461
Ibid., 12.
1462
Crowther, Critical Aesthetics, 43, 45-7.
1463
Carman, Merleau-Ponty, 181.
1464
PP, 54.
1465
PP, 4. By comparison, Mikel Dufrenne asserts that it is “complete perception [which] involves the grasping of a
meaning,” although he similarly affirms that “[t]o perceive is to know – that is, to discover – a meaning within or
beyond appearances” (Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert
A. Anderson, Willis Domingo and Leon Jacobson (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973), 333.
1466
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voice of Silence,” Phenomenology, Language and
Sociology: Selected Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. John O‟Neill (London: Heinemann, 1974, 75.
1467
Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 5.
1457
253
Ponty‟s insistence on the ontological autonomy of art, a field which is yet constituted of entities
“accessible only through direct contact,”1468 rehearses the existential conditions central to the maintenance
of human consciousness in its autopoietic capacity. Here is a theoretical ground upon which the
minimalist notion of unmediated presence might be forwarded. By the processes of perception, the objects
of art are neither mediated nor represented, but, rather, constituted and presented. No rift exists between
intention and reception in the medial continuity of the work qua perception. Merleau-Ponty‟s claim that
art exists as a “nexus of living meanings”1469 furnishes a radical vision of all art as implicitly
anthropocentric.
In a similar register, Mikel Dufrenne acknowledges art as a physical articulation of perception1470 within
the “plane of presence”1471 – the world as it is presented in its undefined encounterability and
perceptibility – in which case art presents perception in a particularly concrete manner.1472 It is in the
sheer physicality by which the aesthetic imbrication of presence and perception is made manifest that
“our body is comparable to a work of art.”1473 However, significant caution must be exercised in the
relation of anthropocentrism to anthropomorphism: if the latter habitually implies the former, the
assumption that the former necessarily leads to the latter is false. Perhaps this last point is what directs
Fried to the contention that a “latent or hidden...anthropomorphism”1474 preoccupies even the most
literalist work. Recognizing the minimalists‟ concern with maximally effective scale, Fried tactically
reduces minimalism‟s claims regarding unmediated presence to a question of scale, and scale to one of
anthropomorphism. Fried‟s implicit phenomenology is one in which access to the existence, emergence
and transformation – not solely of organisms, but of entities in general – is predicated upon anthropic
gesture. The present argument departs considerably in this respect: without denying the constructive
nature of perception, its primary concern lies with the manner in which the Real, by its sheer indifference,
conditions the coherence of every entity qua its persistence. Thus, if for minimalism, “there can be no
conceptual, or mediated, equivalent to laying eyes on something in its presence,”1475 this is not due to its
qualities, as such, but because minimalism institutes a “new regime of [perception, in which]...the
1468
PP, 150-1; Crowther, Critical Aesthetics, 46-7.
PP, 151.
1470
Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 336-7, 340-3. Importantly, he recognizes that the significance of art cannot be fully
contained (ibid., 343).
1471
Ibid., 339.
1472
Finally, Dufrenne claims that presence is an insufficient criterion for the definition of art (ibid., 344), the
intricacies of which argument lie beyond the present discussion.
1473
PP, 151.
1474
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 129. See also ibid., 130. Fried is suspicious of all art which is not directed towards
some sort of transcendence.
1475
Baker, Minimalism, 24.
1469
254
beholder‟s presence is not external to the art object, and that the object is partly determined by the
beholder‟s presence and response.”1476 Thus minimalism‟s paradoxically engaging disengagement from
questions of meaning1477 stems precisely from a radicalization of questions of presentation and
representation according to which “perception is made reflexive in...[its] works and so rendered complex”
even as it struggles with nothingness.1478
f) Minimal intensity and existential appearance
The encounter of thought with nothingness reaches in three broad directions. The first is ontotheological:
nothingness is understood in terms of substance, which is to say, as the instantiation of non-Being, or at
least in terms of nonexistence. The second regards nothingness as a question of relation, or of the radical
ground upon which relation is possible: a complex, unequal and finally non-dialectic relation between
Being and non-Being, existence and nonexistence. Third, it is possible to view nothingness as a point of
exit or of entrance between existence and Being. This is the view implicit in work as different as that of
Levinas and Blanchot, Agamben, and Badiou. In the case of Blanchot and Levinas, nothingness is a point
of exit – linked intimately to death, or rather the impossibility of death; for Agamben, nothingness
becomes obliquely visible upon an inarticulable threshold1479 between externality and interiority; for
Badiou, nothingness is at once a sort of ground and a point of entry into existence. From the quantitative
ontological mould adopted in the present work, and its consequent emphasis on positive manifestation,
nothingness is more adequately accounted for as a point of entry to than exit from existence. In this sense,
nothingness is simply a point of contact with being qua being, pure multiplicity – which is to say that
nothingness points to Being as undifferentiated multiplicity, but also as pure potentiality.
Accepting Badiou‟s claim that it is solely mathematics which is capable of presenting Being qua pure
multiplicity,1480 does not proscribe the poietic instantiation of the aperture between nothingness and
existence, or comprehension of the variable existential intensities which attend every such point of
appearance or disappearance. Measuring the vocation of art against that of mathematics, it becomes
possible to recognize something of an ur-quantity, which is to say the quantitativeness of any quantity.
1476
Berdini, “Similar Emotions,” 47.
Rose, “ABC,” 281-2; 284-92.
1478
Foster, Return, 36.
1479
CC, 67.
1480
Madarasz, Introduction, 7.
1477
255
From this recognition is drawn that “every [existential] situation is infinite”1481 – a claim grounded both in
mathematics and in ordinary logic1482 – and the logical observation that there is no manner of dividing or
counting multiplicity that reduces multiplicity as such.
To exist is to participate in infinite multiplicity according to Badiou, which is significantly at odds with
the Heideggerian understanding of Dasein as being towards finitude. This allows us to recognize that an
existential situation, which arises from pure Being, is infinite to the precise extent that we understand it as
a subtraction from pure multiplicity. “[E]xistence is the proper intensity with which a multiple inscribes
itself into the infinity of a situation.”1483 To apprehend the Real at is most radical, it is necessary to
recognize “the existence of a minimum [of intensity], which corresponds to non-appearance.”1484 Only
against the possibility of non-appearance is the poietic force which in minimalism underpins the sheer
facticity of appearance itself fully comprehensible.
1481
CC, 68.
Ibid., 69.
1483
Badiou, “Existence and Death,” 68.
1484
Alain Badiou, “Notes Toward a Thinking of Appearance,” TW, 189 (182-93).
1482
256
PART THREE: MINIMALISM AS TRANSUMPTIVE
EXISTENTIAL LOGIC
11. THEORETICAL OBJECTHOOD
a) Objects in search of a theory
Several years ago, while preparing to give a class on literary value, I set about finding examples where the
distinction between art and commonplace objects was less than clear, and which exposed the
contingencies which accompany various judgements of value. A friend pointed me to a website which
presents pairs of similar objects – one an actual artefact, the other an ordinary functional thing. What a
wonderful leveller for those naive enough to suppose that aesthetic sophistication rests on knowledge,
judgement, subtlety or taste! Having spent a substantial amount of time studying minimalist sculpture, I
should have been less surprised that, even in the case of those objects which clearly appealed to a broadly
minimalist aesthetic, I was able to hazard only the most tentative of guesses at the identity of the art
object in many of these pairs. After all, one of the principal aims of many minimalists is to level the
distinction between ordinary things and artefacts by reducing or eliminating the traces of artistic facture.
These works offer little in terms of meaning or content, and so resist easy explication. In minimalism we
encounter an aesthetic field scattered with objects in search of a theory.1485
Regarding the apprehension of objects, most models recognize that interpretation is practically, if not
entirely, coincidental with the perception of the object in question.1486 Our concern, however, lies less
with the consequences of interpretation, than with adequately treating the objects of minimalism on their
own terms.1487 Minimalism‟s persistent regard for the object qua its objecthood prompts us to reconsider
theory at its radix: when theorizing, do we begin with objects or do we begin with concepts? Waugh
suggests that “[t]o theorize...is simply to exercise one of the most vital capacities of being human, for
there can be no rational or reflective life without the capacity to stand back and to form second-order
1485
Here we might recall Lyotard‟s claim that “rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for.”
(Lyotard, “Answering the Question,” 81).
1486
On this point thinkers as different as Gadamer (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 306-7), Danto, Transfiguration,
124, and Paul Churchland (Paul Churchland: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey
Into the Brain, Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1995), 11-3, 21) agree.
1487
Bal, Travelling Concepts, 8.
257
judgements about the world and our own behaviour in it.”1488 Waugh‟s point relates primarily to what
Eagleton describes in terms of theory as “human activity bending back upon itself, constrained into a new
kind of self-reflexivity.”1489 “Just as all social life is theoretical,” claims Eagleton, “so all theory is a real
social practice.”1490
For Mieke Bal, a particularly promising means of synthesizing the material, theoretical and metatheoretical spheres, is the theoretical object.1491 Usually the predicate of some artistic practice, such
theoretical objects are at once practical and conceptual, and habitually stimulating numerous and often
highly contradictory responses across a spectrum of theoretically grounded situations.1492 The theoretical
object is able to bridge the material and the ideal1493 in an attempt to come to grips with the urgent
reappraisal of the role of objects,1494 both in culture and more general existential terms. As the carriers of
cultural memory,1495 the singular capacity of theoretical objects is to draw together numerous otherwise
incommensurable concerns.1496 Indeed, many of the examples deployed above to weave together the
ontological, existential and aesthetic concerns of minimalism constitute theoretical objects, engaging
headlong the theory-praxis paradox which Bal paraphrases as follows: “only practice can pronounce on
theoretical validity, yet without theoretical validity no practice can be evaluated.”1497
At this point, given Bal‟s focus on “interdisciplinarity in the humanities,”1498 we do well to recall, as does
Waugh, that theory necessarily presents itself in the same axiomatic terms established by the institutional
rift between the natural and the human sciences.1499 Wolfgang Iser takes the position that the hard-core
theories of natural science – systems of laws, deductively formed and applied as a means of predicting –
1488
Patricia Waugh, “Introduction: criticism, theory, and anti-theory,” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford
Guide (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 10.
1489
Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 27. In his brief and insightful
introduction to the topic, Jonathan Culler similarly emphasizes the reflexivity of theory, together with its
interdisciplinary tendency, its acting as a critique of common sense, and its conjunction of analysis and speculation
(Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 14-5).
1490
Ibid., 24.
1491
Bal, Travelling Concepts, 185.
1492
Ibid.
1493
Often a theoretical object also marks an explicit engagement between the aesthetic and the political, although
this, for the most part, is bracketed in the present work.
1494
Ibid., 8-9. As an alternative, we might also consider the rise of Thing Theory, spearheaded by Bill Brown and the
Chicago-based journal Critical Inquiry.
1495
Ibid., 177, 201.
1496
Ibid., 177, 185.
1497
Ibid., 14.
1498
Ibid., 5.
1499
Waugh, Introduction, 8-14.
258
contrast strongly with the soft theories of the humanities – constructivist, flexible and adaptable.1500
However, Iser presses this theoretical rift too far in insisting that the “humanities are not a problemsolving undertaking. Instead, their prime concern is to achieve understanding.”1501 The conservative
hermeneut is the hero of the humanities only if we are willing to exercise a subtle but decisive ban on the
freedom of conceptual movement. Yet surely thinkers of any discipline are equally concerned with
establishing accurate parameters for their subjects in order to address what is as yet unknown or
undifferentiated – solving the problems of a given subject – as they are with understanding the contents
and significance of these problems. To miss this is to miss the polyvalence of thought itself.
A theory of minimalism would be neither properly scientific nor merely soft. Ultimately it would attempt
to address one question only: can art allow objects to be just objects? Moving carefully towards an
answer, we might consider generalizing to minimalism in all its media Waugh‟s recognition – that in the
theorization of literature there is “a fundamental contradiction at the heart of its activities: that in the end
its instrument of analysis, language, is one that is shared with its object of analysis.”1502 If the great desire
of the minimalist object is for an absolute autonomy with no referential content, then a theory of
minimalism must ultimately be determined by the terms offered by these very same objects. It is intensely
difficult to contemplate a theory which does not rest on causality, yet this is precisely what minimalism
asks of us. Our primary concern is therefore neither what causes minimalism, nor what minimalism, in
turn, causes. These are, of course, interesting questions, but would hand the minimalist object over to
terms which are not necessarily its own. In this rather dim light we are led to a very narrow corridor in
which a working theory of minimalism is marked only by self-description and exemplarity.
b) The gains and risks of meta-theory
It is difficult not to recall two iconoclastic essays at this point: Susan Sontag‟s Against Interpretation,1503
and Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michael‟s Against Theory. Both present a radical species of
theoretical minimalism, albeit they mirror one another in almost diametric opposition. For Sontag, the
great error lies in the reduction of art to content, since this content then encourages an univocal code of
1500
Wolfgang Iser, How To Do Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) 5-7.
Ibid. 7.
1502
Waugh, “Introduction,” 12.
1503
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1964), 1323.
1501
259
interpretation1504 which “impoverishes,”1505 “tames,”1506 and “violates”1507 art, preventing us from
undertaking the real task of criticism, which is “to show how it [the artwork] is what it is, even that it is
what it is, rather than to show what it means.”1508 Knapp and Michaels, on the other hand, target theory
rather than interpretation or meaning. In their estimation, “the theoretical impulse...always involves the
attempt to separate things that should not be separated: on the ontological side, meaning from intention...;
on the epistemological side, knowledge from true belief.”1509 Theory should be abandoned because,
finally, it amounts to no more than the set of strategies people have employed to evade their direct
responsibility to the work itself.1510
Despite numerous and possibly irreconcilable differences between their approaches,1511 Sontag shares
with Knapp and Michaels a common desire to radicalize our relation to art, allowing art to resonate on its
terms. They agree that it is theory – for Sontag, hermeneutic theory, for Knapp and Michaels, any
systematic theory whatsoever – that attempts to appropriate the objects of art. For both, resistance
emerges through a vehement anti-institutionalism, a suspicion of method, and an affirmation of the
ontological autonomy of art.1512 Art may have any number of effects, yet these are fundamental to its
practice and not a theory which precedes and informs its practice. “Theory is not just another name for
practice,” note Knapp and Michaels. “It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside
practice in order to govern practice from without.”1513Although the authors admittedly limit the context of
their statement, it is difficult not to hear in such claims something of a maxim, that praxis obviates the
need for theory. What, then, might we make of a self-limiting theory such as an “emancipatory
theory...[which] has built into it a kind of self-destructive device.”1514Aimed at producing concrete
subjects, situations and objects which are free of some particular restriction, such theories might indeed
1504
It is important to keep in mind that Sontag‟s target is the manner in which interpretation becomes rapidly
institutionalized and governed by normative protocols which she suggests have painfully little to do with that which
they claim to interpret (ibid., 15).
1505
Ibid., 17.
1506
Ibid.
1507
Ibid., 19.
1508
Ibid., 23.
1509
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982): 742.
1510
Ibid.
1511
Their views on intention, hermeneutics and style are radically opposed. Sontag is finally a realist while Knapp
and Michaels are confessed pragmatists.
1512
The logical or epistemological autonomy of art is a more contestable arena.
1513
Ibid. For Culler, theory does not evade its object. Rather, “the literary in theory...has migrated from being the
object of theory to being the quality of theory itself” (Jonathan Culler, “The Literary in Theory,” The Literary in
Theory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 38.
1514
Eagleton, Significance, 33.
260
become practices. It is a dangerous moment when we are prepared to foreclose on potentiality itself – for
such is the wager of an emancipatory theory – in the name of what already exists.
Is it not possible that minimalism envisages a situation in which, contra Knapp‟s and Michaels‟ doubt,
theory is internal to an object? All this really requires is the simple recognition that a minimalist object as
it is also affirms the fact that it is.1515 This may be paraphrased in a familiar formula: theory is
coincidental with praxis. This is illustrated in minimalism by the fact that minimalist praxis centres on
objects as they are, and a theory of minimalism aims, in my view, for no more than the facticity of these
objects, that these objects are as they are. It is Linda Hutcheon‟s description of poetics as an “open, everchanging theoretical structure by which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical
procedures”1516 which translates most closely the broad aim of the present work. “Poetics would not seek
to place itself in a position between theory and practice,” Hutcheon argues, “but would seek a position
within both.” 1517 The poetics of minimalism describes all those objects which instantiate a coincidence of
theory and practice where both resonate the aesthetics we have previously defined as minimalist.
Still exceedingly provocative on the complicity of theory and practice is Paul de Man‟s thesis that what
resists theory is nothing other than theory itself. It is not the refusal of hierarchy, system or method1518
which renders theory problematic in de Man‟s view. That theory is dependent on the same mode of
reading1519 which it directs towards its objects to domesticate them, suggests an internal intricacy which
manifests as self-referential resistance. As Waugh notes, de Man‟s “main interest in theory lies
in...revealing the impossibility of defining theory.”1520 It is not theory qua theoretical practice which
concerns de Man, but rather a poetics in the sense defined by Hutcheon: preserving those concrete
singularities through which theory and practice might be instantiated simultaneously. Here is a metatheory which stands resolutely, and self-consciously, against meta-theory! What greater resistance to
1515
The fact that something is, is to grasp the essence of facticity, to recall the arguments of Agamben and of
Meillassoux, and such facticity, in its turn, is conceivably the essence of art in the estimation of Sontag (Sontag,
“Against Interpretation,” 23).
1516
Hutcheon, Poetics, 14.
1517
Ibid., 17.
1518
In fact the most concrete definition de Man offers of theory in this context is as “a controlled reflection on the
formation of method,” (Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” The Resistance to Theory (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1986), 4.
1519
Reading is here not a simple term, but refers the struggle between rhetorical and grammatical theorisations of
texts or objects. The former is usually generative, the latter explicative, but neither presents a stable model by which
a theory is capable of eliminating undecidability (ibid., 12, 14-5). “[R]eading will be a negative process in which the
grammatical cognition is undone...by its rhetorical displacement” (ibid., 17).
1520
Waugh, “Introduction,” 15.
261
theory might we imagine than precisely this theoretical impasse, which opposes both any theoretical
protocol that would neutralize praxis, as well as that rhetoric which would sacralise the aesthetic?
As noted earlier, what is designated by the term meta occupies a conspicuous threshold: in its thorough
self-reflexivity, it is introspective and gives voice to that which is intrinsic and internal; yet, in promising
an objective view it moves to a position of externality. That meta-theory is immersed in the very
complexity from which it claims to subtract itself in order to act as arbiter,1521objectifying in the process
the dynamics between theory and practice, is a point of tremendous significance. Failing to acknowledge
its own contingency, such a meta-theory might be mistaken as being absolutely binding, in which case it
not only installs itself as praxis, but in so doing withdraws its relation to actual praxis (which conceivably
takes place entirely independently of any theoretical proposition).1522 Such a meta-theory might
conceivably objectify reality in such a way that actual practice, now uncoupled from a relation to any
theory, would seem increasingly unpredictable and anarchic, while meta-theory presents itself as ever
more self-evident. In such a case, the force of theory, falsely elevated, transmutes all too easily to pure
coercion. It is to prevent such ominous situations from arising that the resistance of theory in relation to
itself is eminently significant. “Just as resistance of objects is a necessary condition of the possibility of
knowledge,” notes Culler, “...so resistance to theory may be seen as a necessary force, which calls theory
to account.” 1523
In seeking to understand precisely how theory holds itself to account, we turn to de Man‟s remarkable but
difficult formulation: “[n]othing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this
resistance.”1524 To make significant sense of this, we must take as given that theory necessarily indicates
practice, but only inasmuch as a practice presupposes a theory.1525 A practice, to be considered as such,
rather than as simply a phenomenon, already implies that it is the predicate of a theoretical field to which
it overtly or tacitly appeals. It requires little insight to recognize that many competing theoretical
propositions might legitimately explain a single practice, just as multiple practices can be related to a
1521
A good introductory account of this fact and its consequences is provided by Isabelle Stengers in her essay,
“Complexity, A Fad?” (Isabelle Stengers, “Complexity: A Fad?”, Power and Invention: Situating Science
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 3-20).
1522
Frank Kermode hesitates regarding meta-theory on a very similar count (Frank Kermode and Christopher Norris,
“Music, Religion and Art After Theory,” Life. After. Theory., ed. Michael Payne and John Schad (London and New
York: Continuum, 2003), 117.
1523
Jonathan Culler, “Resisting Theory,” The Literary in Theory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 80.
1524
de Man, Resistance, 19.
1525
This means not that every practice has already been theorised, but that it may potentially be theorised. On
similar points, see Waugh, “Introduction,” 15.
262
single theory. If, in this light, we might accept that the identity of any particular practice is contingent, it
follows that such a practice would not appeal to a theoretical field as the source of an absolute account of
itself. A theory only ever provides an incomplete account of a practice, but because it is only knowable as
theory in relation to practice, we might say that it also provides an incomplete account of itself. In this
sense, theory is the resistance to theory from the perspective both of self-presentation and of practice. In
terms of the former, theory resists itself because it intrinsically implies a practice which it neither
contains, nor for which it can fully account. From the perspective of practice, theory resists itself since
any practice already contains theory to the extent that potentially it can be theorised.
The point to be taken for the present is the following: while theory and practice are logically coextensive
– each implying the other in the very act through which each identifies itself – because theory resists
itself, but practice does not, the actual pursuit of a poetics will always be weighted in favour of practice.
Accepting this imbalance, we begin to see why – particularly in the case of minimalism which, above all,
exemplifies an aesthetic practice of the Real – we can legitimately claim to encounter objects in search of
a theory. Minimalist objects are knowable firstly in the transparency of their practice, through their
instantiation, in the terms of Sontag, of “the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they
are.”1526
It is true, however, that a minimalism divorced from its objects, or pursued on a particularly abstract
level, might seem to occupy a space perilously close to that threatening position in which meta-theory is
installed as an absolute. Clement Greenberg famously criticizes minimalism for its failure to realize the
apotheosis of modern abstraction it promises, through which the distinction of art from non-art might be
eliminated.1527 “Minimal Art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough anything else.”1528 In
Greenberg‟s analysis, minimalism falls prey to its own “ratiocination,”1529 to the extent that we are
confronted not with the sheer presence to which minimalism pretends,1530 but merely with the idea of
presence, so that “what they want to mean betrays them artistically.”1531 The implication, that what is
minimal about minimalism remains essentially an idea or concept, seems to hand the practice of
1526
Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 23.
Greenberg, “Recentness,” 182-3. In particular, he notes how “there remain the relations and interrelations of
surface, contour, and spatial interval,” (ibid., 183) and that “[t]he artistic substance and reality, as distinct from the
program, turn out to be in good safe taste” (ibid., 184).
1528
Ibid., 183.
1529
Ibid., 185.
1530
Ibid.
1531
Ibid., 184.
1527
263
minimalism over to a theoretical operation, reaffirming the rift between sensation and ideation at the very
moment it pledges to bridge these.
Perhaps, because minimalism tends to draw attention so strongly to its objects themselves, rather than to
explanations of their causes or consequences, its theorisation might appear drawn between its materialist
commitment and meta-theoretical abstraction. Yet in its practice, minimalism reveals that there is no
necessary reason why its objects should be predicated exclusively on either conceptual or materialist
terms, or that one should exclude the other. Perhaps the key to understanding minimalism lies in
recognising that there is no intrinsic opposition between the two. Holding together the most descriptive
aesthetic theories and the most abstract meta-theoretical reflection might seem contradictory from within
qualitative logic which dominates the appearance of minimalism‟s objects, but it is non-contradictory in
relation to the quantitative radix of their Being. This affirmation is central to claiming that minimalism
exemplifies the Real.
12. CONCRETE VISUAL ATOPIAS
a) Preamble regarding minimalism and concretism
Regarding the constellation of minimalism and concretism a brief preamble is necessary. The discussion
which follows suggests not that the concrete aesthetic, described below, and the minimalist aesthetic – the
historical and ontological contours of which are described above – can simply be subsumed under a
transcendental thematic, nor that their intrinsic properties necessitate their conjunction. Rather, the
present claim is that at its most minimal, the concrete aesthetic offers a particularly intense field of
exemplarity within which the minimalist existential logic of transumption is visible. Indeed, we might say
that, at its most intense, minimalist concretism is constituted precisely in terms of a meta-exemplarity: a
field of exemplarity which demonstrates the functioning of the example, and which, in its turn, intensifies
our apprehension of the taking-place of the Real. In this light, concretism presents a singular,
transhistorical continuum – a field of potentiality from which might be drawn remarkable focal points
upon which the confluence of expressive media, disciplines and genres is maximally visible precisely
through the generation of concrete minimalist aesthetic objects. Simultaneously, the finest minimalist
264
concretism exemplifies not only minimalism, but also the Real: we might say that concretism itself
constitutes a sort of iconology of the Real.
b) The visible traces of theurgical poiesis
Amongst the many instantiations of minimalism, the meeting of the concrete and the conceptual is staged
with particular clarity in those genres of poetry which radicalise the interrelation of literature, music and
the visual arts. Steiner goes as far as to claim that “the attempt to overreach the boundaries between one
art and another is [...] an attempt to dispel (or at least mask) the boundary between art and life, between
sign and thing, between writing and dialogue.”1532 Perloff recalls that poetry as we understand it emerges
“from the Greek poiesis, a making or creation,”1533 being focused further in the “Medieval Latin, poetria,
the art of verbal creation.”1534 Thus conceived, poiesis asks us to probe the very stuff of poetry, to press
beyond form and trope to the medium which itself carries creation, the radical stuff upon which the very
potential of poetry‟s taking-place is conditioned.
Yet neither poiesis nor any medium through which it is conveyed seem to submit themselves readily to
our scrutiny. This difficulty stems from Plato‟s “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry,1535 an
antipathy which may be extended to art in general inasmuch as the latter aspires to exceed its status as
mimesis, the imitation of the apparent world which itself is only a representation of the true and perfect
Forms which precede it.1536 Art is often understood as the polemical ground upon which what is real
1532
Wendy Steiner, The Colour of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting
(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1982), 2-5. In Bohn‟s estimation, Steiner‟s vision dissolves not only “the
traditional barriers between the reader and text; it erases the boundaries between the text and the world” (Willard
Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 8). As regards the former,
reading visual poetry naturally presents several challenges to the conventional relationship of reader to text by
undermining verbal, grammatical and hermeneutic norms (presenting what is perhaps the interart equivalent of
Barthes‟ writerly texts). As regards the latter, since in interartistic poetry the text is – by virtue of is intermedial
constitution, which eschews the conventions of mimetic art – something which is presented, rather than merely
represented, it belongs as much to the Real as does any other object.
1533
Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, “Introduction: The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound,” The Sound of
Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2009),
1. Collection hereafter SP/PS.
1534
Ibid.
1535
Plato, Repubic, 607b/1211.
1536
“It is true then about some of these things that not only the Form itself deserves its own name for all time, but
there is something else that is not the Form but has its character whenever it exists,” to recall the Platonic doctrine of
Forms (Plato, “Phaedo,” trans. G.M.A. Grube. Plato Complete Works, 103e/89. Forms, which are perfect, true and
good, are prototypical. The objects of ordinary experience are mere representations of these, while art merely
imitates what the world represents of Forms and so is ontologically inferior, and morally dangerous insofar as it
265
battles with what merely appears to be real, where the poietic production of reality comes up against the
mimetic reflection of reality.1537 Culler relates how an historical bifurcation conditions any project of
poetics: the Classical view asserts a “criticism...linked to generic categories based on mimesis...and to the
rhetorical analysis of efficacious speech”1538 in terms of the “norms of genre, verisimilitude, and
appropriate expression;”1539 Romanticism introduces the “concept of literature as expression”1540 which
“expresses the state of affairs, the language, the genius that gave rise to them.” 1541 Danto observes a
similar polarity in his epochal essay, “The Art World,” between the imitation theory of art, in which art is
fundamentally mimetic, and the reality theory of art, in which art materializes through radical poiesis. In
terms of the latter, artists are “to be understood not as unsuccessfully imitating real forms but as
successfully creating new ones, quite as real as the forms which the older art has been thought...to be
credibly imitating.”1542 This considered, the question of medium becomes intricate with the disputed radix
of art itself. If art is mimetic, its success in representing its subject is matched in proportion by the
transparency of its medium.1543By contrast, the opacity of its medium is of considerable significance to
poietic art, which, in claiming to produce the Real, refuses to reduce art to a question of its content (what
it is about) as is the case with mimetic art.1544 In the most austere cases of an art which makes poiesis its
first concern – such works which are virtually synonymous with minimalism – the “artwork is only the
material it is made from; it is canvas and paper, ink and paint, words and noise, sounds and
movements.”1545
At the end of this pursuit we discover poetry which is at once conceptual and concrete. In its conceptual
dimension it is meta-theoretical, abstracting from itself the force of mediation or transumption. In its
pretends to the absolute good of Forms. Danto‟s discussion is particularly insightful in this regard (Danto,
Transfiguration, 7-9; 11-4), as is that of Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 253-9). Making a similar point,
Montag offers the following (in a passage explicitly unsympathetic to Deleuze‟s analysis): “[t]he current description
of art and culture as simulacra are quite simply Platonic in the most traditional sense...Plato argued that the
particular is a representation of the form and that art is a representation of the particular and thus a representation of
a representation...His denunciation of art as mere appearance is not based on the hypothesis of its immateriality but
precisely the opposite: its irreducible materiality” (Warren Montag, “What is at Stake in the Debate on
Postmodernism?,” Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London and New
York: Verso, 1988), 98).
1537
Danto, Transfiguration, 13.
1538
Jonathan Culler, “Introduction: Critical Paradigms,” PMLA, 125.4 (2010): 905.
1539
Ibid., 906.
1540
Ibid., 905.
1541
Ibid., 906.
1542
Arthur C. Danto, “The Art World,” Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology,
ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugon Olsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 28.
1543
Danto, Transfiguration, 151-3.
1544
Ibid., 159.
1545
Ibid.
266
concrete dimension it consists of vision, sound and language in their rawest states, cognising itself in
terms of pure medium. It is in recognising the persistent tension in any radical conception of poiesis –
between imitation and the Real, between concrete and concept, between medium and mediation, and,
finally between art and life – that Steiner‟s claim above gains momentum. With respect to the critical
understanding of medium as poem, this tension manifests in the pull between the individuation and
interpenetration of poetic media. One might legitimately emphasise the pursuit of these media in isolation,
claiming that sound poetry, visual poetry, and language-centred poetry ought to be understood from
within their individual trajectories.1546 Equally, the transfiguration of medium to poem can be seen to rest
on some stabilising poietic force which is designated, but not defined, by a generic aesthetic term such as
concretism.1547 The historical analysis of poetic medium as poem benefits most from the stratification of
separate media, while the aesthetic approach to understanding these, benefits from the development of
operative terms and concepts.
It is disappointing that, despite its ubiquity, poetry centred on vision, sound and language as media should
remain undervalued: “the critical response to visual poetry over the years has been disappointing,” 1548
announces Bohn, and Perloff remarks similarly of sound poetry, that, “however central the sound
dimension is to any and all poetry, no other poetic feature is currently as neglected.”1549 If the concerns
shared by minimalism and various types of aesthetic concretism are significant, the interrogation of these
remains beset by historical problems. “Concrete poetry is a small part of a larger picture,” claims
pioneering experimentalist, Dick Higgins. “[I]t would...be a misprision to discuss it in isolation from
sound poetry, aleatory poetry, and the other intermedial poetries with which it shares many strategies,
purposes and much of its history.”1550
1546
To regard each in isolation – initially as a qualitative constituent of poetry; subsequently as a medium in itself –
recalls questions of ontological quantity, and thus a sphere which this poetry shares with minimalism.
1547
Mary Ann Caws provides a useful overview of this term. First deployed in the 1930s, it covers both an attitude
of abstraction – of “the object from all attachment to reference” (Mary Ann Caws, “Concretism,” Manifesto,
518 – and of manifestation, installing the aesthetic medium as work. As a “formal modernism” (ibid) it might be
closely related to a number of its abstract precursors, and, as it is deployed in the present work, it includes the
experimental modes of sound and visual poetry described in terms of Concrete poetry in the 1950s, as well as many
of the works of smaller groups such as the Spatialists (Ilse and Pierre Garnier, Henri Chopin), Lettrists, and a
miscellany of works currently being produced under the banner of new media and intermedia art (ibid., 518-9).
1548
AVP, 1.
1549
Perloff and Dworkin, “Introduction,” 1. While Perloff‟s are general comments on sound in poetry, they also act
as the prelude to a series of discussions on sound poetry as genre.
1550
Charles Bernstein, Willard Bohn, Claus Clüver, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, E.M. de Melo e
Castro, Johanna Drucker, Ana Hatherly, Dick Higgins, Susanne Jorn, Eduardo Kac, Wladimir Kryksinski, Steve
McCaffery, Philadelpho Menezes, Luciano Nanni, Caoi Pagano, Marjorie Perloff, John Picchione, Harry
Polkinhorn, John Solt, Lello Voce, Eric Vos. “The Yale Symphosymposium on Contemporary Poetics and
Concretism: A World View From the 1990s,” Experimental – Visual – Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the
267
The conscious combination of text and image begins not with poetry, however, but with the invocations
of purportedly magical amulets. These have functions ranging from incantations against malicious spirits
to the treatment of illness, in which cases the pictograph was both the prescription and the cure.1551 This
essentially talismanic use, progresses, according to Bowler, to a more mystical view of calligraphy in
which writing is “connected not only with ...technique, skill and art, but also with...spiritual and moral
character.”1552 The venerable lineage of visual poetry, while not strictly separable from the “magical and
mystical impetus to shape texts,”1553 may be identified with the desire to integrate more fully the poietic
(generative), aesthetic and symbolic aspects of text and form. Such practices can be traced as far back as
the Greek technopaegina of the third century BC,1554 since which time visual poetry has proved an
abiding concern, practised both globally and transhistorically. Hellenistic calligrams – works constituted
of single or multiple graphemes in the form of an object, often an object related to the work on a semantic
level – were shaped by the careful arrangement of lines and a prescribed pattern of reading (Figure
80),1555 a technique adopted by the Romans in their carmina figurata. In the Arab world, by contrast,
where problematic religious implications of certain types of figuration persist, forms tend to be
calligraphically determined, objects emerging from the careful reshaping of letters (Figure 81).1556
1960s. Ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. 367-416.
Individual contributions, such as that in the quotation above, will be cited in the form that follows: Higgins,
Symphosymposium, 398. Collection hereafter EVC.
1551
Berjouhi Bowler, The word as image (London: Studio Vista, 1970) 7-8; 119. Notable examples exist in almost
all ancient cultures, and such talismans are by no means uncommon in the contemporary world (ibid).
1552
Ibid. Again, this is a widespread view held by calligraphers from the Far East, to the scribes of medieval Europe.
1553
Ibid., 9.
1554
Ibid. See AVP, 1.
1555
Simias of Rhodes, Egg calligram, 3rd century BC, Rhodes (Bowler, Word, 57). To be read from the outside
towards the centre, this egg-shaped bucolic poem also serves to draw attention to the nature of poetry (ibid., 128).
Possibly, like an egg, a poem is contained by its form, but this form itself contains the potential for poiesis. Figures
81 to 83 appear in Bowler‟s excellent anthology as indicated in parenthesis.
1556
Amuletic tughra, Iran. Date unspecified (ibid., 29). “Tughra writings are the most ingenious use of Arabic script.
A sentence from the Koran or a common prayer is written in a way that the composition outlines a [form]” (ibid.,
124). In this example, a face is composed of four words – Allah, Mohammed, Ali and Hassan – which mirror each
other to make up the left and right halves of the face (ibid.).
268
Figure 80: Simias of Rhodes, Egg calligram. 3rd century BC,
Rhodes.
Figure 82: Hanuman Calligram, Sanskrit, 19th century.
Edition of Ramayana.
Figure 81: Amuletic tughra, Iran. Date
unspecified.
Figure 83: Massoeretic Text, Hebrew, 14th century.
British Museum, London.
269
Calligrammatic poetry is prevalent both in Urdu and in Sanskrit. Notable amongst the latter for its
immense detail, is the figure of Hanuman (Figure 82) which is formed by a narrative which encompasses
his entire life, from birth to his death.1557 Visual poems, mostly of a religious nature, are equally
widespread throughout Medieval Europe – from Armenia and Turkey in the south east, to Germany in the
north west – and throughout the sub-continent. Of the finest religious calligrams are Hebrew massoeretic
texts: “the massorah, which is the critical emendation found on certain pages...[u]nexpectedly, in some
manuscripts...is shaped into patterns”1558 (Figure 83).1559
It was only at the start of the seventeenth century – the dawn of the early modern period in western
Europe – that the first English calligrams of any poetic significance were produced. As Sloane notes, it
was not uncommon for the attitude of seventeenth century poets towards the visual to “swing
inconsistently back and forth between what were considered either primarily Aristotelian or primarily
Platonic conceptions of knowledge obtained through the senses.”1560 This dialectic is expressed with some
force in the manner in which concrete visuality is interrogated in much of their poetry. Whether through
particularly evocative diction or physical form, Sloane confirms that “the tendency to visualize ideas
reached its zenith in the early years of the seventeenth century.”1561 Thus, the strong lines of the
metaphysical poets frequently became so strong as to take on physical form. There is indeed a curious, if
indirect, commentary on the Platonic doctrine of Forms here. Such poetry draws attention to the symbolic
character of writing, affirming the force of representation at the level of both semantics and form – in
what the poem means and the physical shape it takes to convey or enhance this meaning. Yet their form
merely reflects, rather than predicates, the logos of such poems which – particularly in view the
predilection of the best of these pattern poems for religious themes – remains in an important sense
transcendental. This is reflected in George Herbert‟s “The Altar” (Figure 84)1562 and Robert Herrick‟s
“The Cross,” which are exemplary of the calligrams of this period. Also significant is the emblem – a
Hanuman Calligram, Sanskrit, 19th century. Edition of Ramayana (ibid., 22). Hanuman is an Indian deity, one of
a mythical ape-like race, the vanaras, and a devotee of Rama in the Indian epic, the Ramayana.
1558
Ibid., 128.
1559
Massoeretic Text, Hebrew, 14th century. British Museum, London (ibid., 53)
1560
Mary Cole Sloane, The Visual in Metaphysical Poetry (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 5). To
recall, albeit in very inadequately schematic terms, Plato believes that a faint knowledge of the ideal which precedes
sensory experience, while Aristotle believes that knowledge is acquired through sensory experiences.
1561
Ibid., 24.
1562
George Herbert, The Altar, 1633
1557
270
visual genre inherited from the Renaissance consisting of a motto, a symbolic illustration, and an
epigrammatic exposition of these in formal verse1563 – which is well-represented by Geoffrey Whitney‟s A
Choice of Emblems (1586) and Francis Quarles‟ Emblems (1635).
Concerning Herbert‟s poem, one must recall that the altar is a favourite motif of visual poetry,1564 not only
connecting the work to the formal rites of religion, but also connecting poietic inspiration to the surrender
and sacrifice of the self to the divine.1565 “The Alter” is a fine example of the visual poem as symbol: its
physical form (as altar) reinforces the conceit which gives the poem its momentum – the heart as altar –
while its true subject transcends either word or form, since the heart is finally a cipher for the human soul
and its relation to God.
Figure 84: George Herbert, The Altar, 1633.
Between the seventeenth century and the present the relation of visual and verbal art has been exposed in
numerous and often rather contradictory ways. We might consider the mystical intricacy and virtuosity of
William Blake‟s illuminated poetry in relation to G.E. Lessing‟s celebrated essay on aesthetics, Laokoön.
1563
These epigrams were often not present in early Renaissance emblems, but became increasingly detailed and
meditative in the case of the metaphysical poets (ibid.).
1564
Bowler, Word, 129.
1565
This impulse might be traced to ancient Dionysian and Orphic cults in Greece which emphasise enthusiasm, or,
as it meant then, the fusion of the human and the divine (Russell, History, 24-7, 30-1).
271
The point of comparison between painting and poetry has historically rested on a common symbolic or
analogical appeal. The Horatian maxim ut pictura poesis – as is painting, so is poetry – expands upon its
classical radix, and strikingly paraphrases the dominant Baroque and Neo-Classical understanding that
what renders the literary and pictorial comparable, is finally symbolic – the shared and somewhat abstract
evocation of images to which they both appeal.1566 “Symbolic or allegorical art,” of which calligrammatic
poetry is exemplary, “thus seem[s] a natural point of convergence and cooperation between literature and
art.”1567 For all its stylistic innovation and visionary appeal, work such as Blake‟s remains traditional in
this respect. The Romantic period witnesses a radical intensification of aesthetic self-consciousness,1568
particularly in the case of poetry.
The fragment poem and the philosophical fragment reflect simultaneously on their poietic genesis and
their particular poetic attributes in terms of subject, language and form. We might recognise in this
specialisation of medium something of the shift heralded by Lessing, from an historical focus on the
likeness to which both painting and poetry appeal, to a focus on the force of relation itself. For two things
to be related, they must in an important sense retain their individuality, which is why Lessing “deplore[s]
this confusion of genres”1569 which weakens both painting and poetry. Lessing insists that for the visual
arts or literature to thrive, it is necessary to differentiate the dominance of space in the former from the
fundamentally temporal concerns of the latter.1570 On this basis, Lessing‟s Laokoön is taken to justify an
increased separation of poetry from painting as the basis for their mutually benefitting one another.1571
“Lessing‟s objections to the neoclassical ut pictura poesis argument contributed to the general shift in
aesthetic thinking that marks the romantic period,”1572 says Steiner, as art qua mimesis gives way to art
qua expression.1573
1566
Steiner, Colors, 6-10.
Ibid., 9.
1568
Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, 3-4.
1569
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 126.
1570
Steiner, Colors, xiii.
1571
Ibid., 12-3.
1572
Ibid., 14.
1573
Ibid. Danto points to the limitations of both purely mimetic and antimimetic understandings of art (Danto,
Transfiguration, 13, 21, 68-9, 76-83).
1567
272
c) Locating the atopia of poetry
“A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance,”1574 one of the great poems of Stéphane Mallarmé‟s
oeuvre, has a strong claim to being an inaugural work of the Modernist avant-garde. It combines
typographical experimentation (varying capitalisation, type and size of the lettering) with careful attention
to the Gestalt of the poem, “a certain distribution of space”1575in which words and lines are carefully
arranged so that they seem “now to speed along and now again to slow down the motion.”1576 The poem
institutes a particularly concrete type of self-reflexivity:1577 its visual form intensifies its concern with
chance as a force of both generation and negation – the poem, subject to aleatory forces, imposes a node
of order, “a limit on infinity,”1578 while retaining its proximity to “the void in which all reality is
dissolved.”1579 Mallarmé reminds us that the true significance of poiesis lies in its making possible the
place of poetry – “Nothing...will have taken place...but the place”1580 – recognising that the problem of
meaning remains undecidable, subject to contingent rules which are not, strictly speaking, poietic. “The
labor of writing is no longer a transparent ether,” Derrida tells us. “It catches our attention and forces us,
since we are unable to go beyond it with a simple gesture in the direction of what it „means,‟ to stop short
in front of it or to work with it.”1581
To work with the poem means firstly to recognise that its form is, in fact, a type of performance.1582 Here
we are at once reminded of the Kantian position, in which “[f]orm is the unmistakable „space‟
of...aesthetics”1583 insofar as it “denote[s] the difference between determination and the determinable in
1574
Stéphane Mallarmé, “A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance,” trans. Daisy Aldan, Poems for the
Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle
to Negritude, ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 53-76. Anthology hereafter
PMV1.
1575
Stéphane Mallarmé, Preface, Throw, 53.
1576
Ibid.
1577
The Noigrandes concrete poets regard this as the inaugural work of aesthetic concretism (Haroldo do Campos,
Symphosymposium, 376; Clüver, Symphosymposium, 376-7 and Claus Clüver, “Concrete Poetry: Critical
Perspectives from the 90s,” EVC, 268; Marjorie Perloff, “Concrete Prose in the Nineties: Haroldo de Campos‟s
Galáxias and After,” Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet, ed. K. David Jackson
(Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2005), 144.
1578
Mallarmé, “Throw,” 69.
1579
Ibid., 73.
1580
Ibid. 72-3. Figures 85 and 86 demonstrate the importance of typography and layout in Mallarmé‟s poem, its use
of capitalization, empty space and line break, which, for the sake of fluency, have not been rendered exactly in the
present quotations from the poem.
1581
Jacques Derrida, “Mallarmé,” trans. Christine Roulston, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, (New York and
London: Routledge, 1992), 114.
1582
See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 108-9.
1583
Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 10.
273
general.”1584 In this sense, form constitutes the field of potentiality upon which the fusion of thought,
thing, sensible intuition and experience takes place1585 without which the “formation of a representation of
objects”1586 would be impossible. Form is at once the founding premise and horizon with regard to poietic
taking-place, in which light we come to understand that poetic form is neither transcendental nor static,
and might be comprehended more readily as a process, the “putting-into-form of...formation.”1587 Form,
in this sense, is a processual shaping of the generative force of poiesis which recalls and reinforces the
necessity both of structure and of structuration in any existential situation.
“A Throw of the Dice” exhibits a remarkable grasp of the complexities of form: it is both singular in
instantiation and universal in its evocation of poietic force.1588 Badiou offers the following evocative
précis of the poem: “[u]pon an anonymous maritime surface, an old Master mockingly shakes his hand,
cupped over dice, hesitating before the throw [of the dice] for so long that it seems as if he‟ll be
swallowed up before the gesture will have been decided.”1589 The subject of the poem is chance, the
significance of action and inaction in relation to chance,1590 and the undecidability which inhabits aleatory
situations.1591 Mallarmé leads us to the “impossibility of rational choice – [the impossibility] of the
abolition of chance”1592 – through that most encompassing archetype of ontological flux, the ocean,1593
1584
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 8.
1586
Ibid., 6.
1587
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe & Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German
Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State U of New York P, 1988), 105. It is with this
phrase that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy attempt to convey the urgency of the critical project which Romanticism
regards as inseparable from literature. To pursue poiesis requires more than an understanding of form itself or even
an analysis of how form itself is formed (“the putting-into-form of form” (ibid., 104)). Finally, we require insight
into the process of formation in the full presence of its taking-place – the “putting-into-form of…formation” – which
confirms the correlative dynamism between poiesis and poetic form.
1588
Badiou defends the “universality of great poems” on philosophical rather than formal grounds (Alain Badiou,
Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 46), but if we are willing to
concede that poetic form and Badiou‟s topology of the event are homological in that they both constitute dynamic
foundations (BE,175) – of the instantiation of poiesis and of the production of novelty respectively – while
simultaneously transecting and interrupting the ordinary state of being, the two views are comparable. Badiou offers
two remarkable readings of Mallarmé‟s poem: the first in Mediation Nineteen of Being and Event (BE, 191-8)
examines the poem as analogy to Badiou‟s model of the event; the second in Handbook of Inaesthetics (Badiou,
Handbook, 46-56), political in tenor, relates the poem to tension between mastery and non-mastery, choice and nonchoice, in contemporary politics.
1589
Ibid., 46.
1590
The poem generates the situation “such that to act or not to act, to throw or not to throw the dice, amount to
equivalent arrangements” (ibid., 50).
1591
BE, 193-4.
1592
Ibid., 195.
1593
Regarding the noise of pure Being, connected analogically to the sea, Michel Serres notes that “[t]he silence of
the sea is mere appearance. Background noise may well be the ground of our being” (Serres, Genesis, 13).
1585
274
brought into proximity with the inadequate and human approximation of these inestimable forces, the
throw of the dice. This action represents the force of poiesis. The wager is the poem itself. The latter
emerges from the generative chaos of the aleatory event, attempts to unify in its taking-place the elements
of pure Being, and failing to do so, recedes into the recognition that poiesis is finally incapable of
approximating Being, which is to say, multiplicity itself. “The number...even if it existed...even if it began
and even if it ceased...even if it summed up...this would be no worse nor better but as indifferent as
chance”1594
Figure 85: Stéphane Mallarmé, A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance, 70-1.
Returning to the poem, according to Badiou “the metaphor of all evental sites being on the edge of the void is
edified on the basis of a deserted horizon and a stormy sea” (BE, 192), recalling that Badiou defines the evental site
as an abnormal multiple which is presented in a situation, without any of its elements being presented in a situation,
which therefore is “on the edge of the void, or foundational” (ibid., 175). It the ontological condition, as grasped in
set theory, of an empty ground upon which an event takes place – an event which conditions but does not itself
actually participate in a situation (hence that the elements of the site can remain unpresented).
1594
Mallarmé, “Throw,” 70-1 (Figure 85).
275
In Badiou‟s estimation, the poem “joins the emblem of chance to that of necessity, the erratic multiple of
the event to the legible retroaction of the count. The event in question...is therefore that of the production
of an absolute symbol of the event. The stakes...are those of making an event out of the thought of the
event.”1595 Important here is the recognition that poiesis does not produce the event, but produces the trace
of an event. Mallarmé‟s poem, in this view, points towards the eventality of the event, “the „pure
event‟”1596 which attempts to grasp that which “lies beyond what is, what purely happens.”1597
It is significant that Badiou should deploy the “emblem” – the principal genre of seventeenth century
visual poetry – and “symbol” – those things which “embody their meanings and explain their mode of
embodiment,”1598 in Danto‟s terms. The concrete and conceptual are conjoined – continuous and
complementary – as the scattering of words across the page, anticipates the surrender to chance, the throw
of the dice; the typographical experimentation (italics, upper-case letters, and words of different sizes)
generates fragmentary narratives, short sequences in which the poet attempts to impose order upon the
disorder which finally overwhelms the work.
Mallarmé heralds many of the significant aesthetic concerns of Modernist and Postmodernist art. In
search of a poetry “freed from any scribal apparatus,”1599 as Rancière suggests, the poem exhibits a
tangible anxiety regarding the difficulties of autonomy, a question brought into focus through the poet‟s
thematic and formal concern with aleatory operations, which were to influence numerous future paths of
aesthetic thought. The possibility of univocal interpretation, perhaps of meaning itself, is revealed as a
radical uncertainty – a sentiment echoed, often amplified, in the work which follows. This vision cannot
be separated from a radical reconsideration of poetic form, lineation and diction. It is not, I believe, too
much of a stretch to suggest that “A Throw of the Dice” is the first aesthetically significant concrete
poem, far exceeding the representational logic of the calligram in its integration of its visual and
conceptual elements, so that these simultaneously reflect on themselves, and reflect on one other. As a
concrete exemplar of chance, the poem is caught in the productive paradox of being at once autopoietic
and “indifferent” to its productive capacities. This is one of the central issues which concrete poetry
1595
BE, 193. Norris relates Badiou‟s analysis of the poem as “a subtle registration of the way that various imagined
events impact upon the very process of thought – not ...the state of consciousness – that it seemingly described,
represents or narrates” (Norris, Badiou, 123).
1596
LW, 516.
1597
Ibid.
1598
Danto, “Art World Revisited,” 41.
1599
Rancière, Future, 95.
276
confronts, since “[i]n the last analysis the poems are their own justification. The fact that they exist is
enough.”1600
There is much to recommend the poem as a prototypical form of minimalism. The economy of
Mallarmé‟s style veers towards austerity. Its experimentation with lineation and visual arrangement is at
times fragmentary – a fragmentariness which augments its subject, chance, and which is also
characteristic of those works which are generated by aleatory operations.1601 At other moments it exposes
the material and processual aspects of textuality itself at their most fundamental. We might only think as
far as the carefully constructed diagonal of the “LET IT BE” sequence1602 arranged across two facing
pages, which begins slowly from the top left, drawing attention to the topographical isolation of the
“Abyss” and the nullity it threatens, which accelerates rapidly in self-conscious, diminutive lines towards
the centre of the textual surface, gathering there, coming to a near halt, before tapering more slowly,
ponderous and hesitant, towards the bottom right (Figure 86). These words, as carefully arranged as they
are chosen, draw attention to negative space – the blank, empty space of the page, a “visual silence, which
creates a privileged space for the text and its individual images.”1603 The work in its most severe concrete
elements recalls the minimalist concern with containment. That this containment fails – that chance,
which itself marks a sort of minimalism of intervention on the part of the artist, is finally atopian –
compels us to recognize and retrace the same transformative logic which is in the present work defined in
terms of transumption. A minimal intervention transforms the fundamental material of the poem in order
to generate the poem as such. This seems to endorse of “A Throw of the Dice” as an early instantiation of
aesthetic concretism, and while it would be absurd to conclude that Mallarmé was a committed
minimalist, it would be even stranger to ignore the fact that several of the work‟s most notable
characteristics – concerns regarding medium, style and poiesis itself in their most radical forms – are
intrinsic to any minimalist enterprise. In this sense, we come to recognize aspects of minimalism as
transhistorical phenomena insofar as minimalism concerns radices intrinsic to art itself, rather than any
act of artistic or critical will.
1600
AVP, 2.
In this respect, one might consider “Language Event One” – the Surrealist symcomposition in which each poet
writes two unrelated clauses which are then combined at random (Louis Aragon, George Sadoul, Benjamin Péret,
Suzanne Muzard, Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Elsie Péret and Pierre Unik, “Language Event One,” PMV1, 472-3),
or the fragmentary works produced by the more thorough aleatory techniques of Jackson Mac Low and John Cage.
1602
Mallarmé, “Throw,” 58-9.
1603
Bohn, Visual Poetry, 4.
1601
277
Figure 86: Stéphane Mallarmé, A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance, 58-9.
That the ontological precision1604 of “A Throw of the Dice” should be matched by its innovative formal
presentation explains its perceptible influence in much of the poetry which follows it. The poem‟s
fragments, hesitations, empty spaces and typographical variation bring an unprecedented depth of
reflexivity between the conceptual and the concrete in the understanding of visual poetry, Mallarmé,
whether despised or emulated, was unquestionably a significant influence on visual poetry as well as on
the refinement of a broadly minimalist aesthetic which would come to prominence in the twentieth
century.
“Refined, redesigned, and redefined, visual poetry has been the object of countless schools and
movements,”1605stresses Bohn. In the early twentieth-century, these visual poets pursued two principal
routes. The first path, upon which we encounter the Imagists, Ultraists and Surrealists, emphasises the
1604
1605
Norris, Badiou, 121.
AVP, 1.
278
iconic aspects of the visual poem – its capacity to offer an intensified view of its objects.1606 By contrast,
Futurism, Dada and Vorticism express an iconoclastic disruption, a constitutive displacement which
deposes the conventional hierarchy between word and visual design.1607
In terms of the intensified iconic value of poetry, the example of the Imagists is instructive, and also of
some relevance to a firmer grasp of the minimalist aesthetic. Like many other movements in twentieth
century literature, Imagism self-consciously defines its own parameters in a number of manifestos,
anthologies and historical reflections produced between 1914 and 1917. According to Hughes, the
Imagists are influenced to a significant degree by the progressive French poetry of the symbolists and
cubists,1608 and draw a “common stimulus”1609 from the aesthetics of T. E. Hulme, “who quite reasonably
may be called the „father of imagism.‟”1610 Indeed, Kermode claims that “[t]he principles of the Imagist
manifesto...are all Hulmian.”1611 Hulme‟s aesthetic theory1612 is based on a view of nature in terms of an
essential discontinuity between the vital and the mechanical, the intuitive and the scientific.1613 We are
left with a problematic relativism when these are collapsed into one another – the Romanticism which
Hulme asserts mistakes humanist values for absolute value;1614 a deluded search for infinity.1615 In setting
the scene for the emergence of Imagism, and in opposition to Romanticism, Hulme champions what he
asserts is a neo-classical aesthetic – a poetic “holding back, a reservation”1616which marks the poet‟s
awareness of his or her finitude. “In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the
infinite nothing,” he tells us. “You are always faithful to the conception of a limit.”1617
1606
These objects might belong as easily to a realist as to a surrealist frame of reference. Its iconic quality rests on
the transparency of its representation, rather than the nature of that which is represented.
1607
Cubism presents a difficult case, since it claims that its iconic insight is entirely continuous with its iconoclastic
aspects.
1608
Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1960), 4-9. See
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Fontana, 1961), 134-5; 144-5.
1609
Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, 22.
1610
Ibid., 9.
1611
Kermode, Romantic Image, 149-150.
1612
To illustrate this theory, Hulme famously composes five short, austere, but remarkably evocative poems.
1613
Kermode, ibid., 136. Hulme derives much of his philosophical justification from Bergson. This connection is
discussed principally in two essays by Hulme: T. E. Hulme, “Bergson‟s Theory of Art,” Speculations: Essays on
Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge, 1936), 143-169; and T. E. Hulme,
“Intensive Manifolds,” Speculations, 173-214.
1614
Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, 14.
1615
T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” Speculations, 116, 119 (111-40); Kermode, Romantic Image, 139141.
1616
Hulme, Speculations, 120.
1617
Ibid.
279
Yet it is on an understanding of the image that his entire metaphysics rests. “Images in verse are not mere
decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language”1618 which conveys reality. Poetry, in its turn,
carries the responsibility of communicating images in concrete terms, not through “discursive meaning
[...],”1619 but through an immediacy made possible by the well-constructed poem. In contrast to prose,
which reduces concrete reality to a syntax of abstract signs or markers, poetry embodies a concrete
language of images which “always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical
thing.”1620 The poetry this attitude engenders is thoroughly classical, in Hulme‟s terms, possessing a “dry
hardness”1621 which focuses on “accurate description,”1622 “confined to the earthly and the
definite...[revealed in] the light of the ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea.” 1623
Convinced of the “inadequacy of language,”1624 that “[p]lain speech is essentially inaccurate,”1625 the poet
must invent new metaphors by maintaining a close connection to concrete, finite things. 1626 Kermode
summarises the situation well in noting that, for Hulme, “[p]oetry, by virtue of the image, is; prose merely
describes. One is end, the other means. What poetry seems to be about is therefore irrelevant to its
value.”1627
Here we might recall Levinas‟ formulation of the image precisely as art‟s means of maintaining
communicativity outside of any particular message. Operating within a field of resemblance, the image
constitutes an existential residue of the passage between Being and existence, and consequently abstracts
our ordinary relation to material objects as well as concepts. Despite considerable divergences, it is
notable that the philosophical understanding of the image clarifies the view of the Real adopted by both
thinkers. For Levinas, the image allows art to enter into relation with its own facticity. By Hulme‟s
account, the image allows poetry to penetrate to the heart of the Real in a manner not dissimilar to the
claim I make for minimalism in the present work. What separates Imagism from minimalism, despite this
and numerous other stylistic similarities, is its reliance on a form of mediation – analogy – which does not
fully come to terms with its medium. The poetic medium remains opaque, even as poetry reaches for a
1618
Ibid., 135.
Kermode, Romantic Image, 142.
1620
Hulme, Speculations, 134.
1621
Ibid., 126.
1622
Ibid., 127.
1623
Ibid.
1624
Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, 17.
1625
Hulme, Speculations, 137.
1626
To the romantic imagination, subsumed by emotion which distorts the actual plenitude of our response to the
world, Hulme opposes fancy – the modern poet‟s response linked to concrete, finite things (ibid., 137-8).
1627
Kermode, Romantic Image, 142.
1619
280
clearer relation to real things.1628 To recall, minimalism exemplifies the facticity of the Real, and a
reliance on the essentially metaphysical idea of the Image cannot easily be reconciled with such facticity.
As Kermode argues, Hulme never truly escapes a mystical elevation of the Image which emerges from
the romanticism he derides:1629 the “twin concepts of the isolated artist and the supernatural Image to
which he gains access”1630 remain present in his thought, and, indeed, in Imagism in general.
As a literary movement, Imagism owes its genesis to the friendship which grew from a rather heated
disagreement in 1909 between Hulme and F. S. Flint following a critical review of the former‟s work by
the latter.1631 They soon found themselves in general agreement on the importance of accurate poetic
presentation stripped of excess verbal complexity, establishing their own group for discussion. In April of
the same year they were joined by a young Ezra Pound, who had arrived independently at a strikingly
similar aesthetic position, and who, in 1912, coined the term Imagiste to describe their work and,
particularly, the poetry of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington. 1913 saw the publication of two
Imagist manifestos – one by Flint, the other by Pound – and in 1914, Pound edited the first anthology of
Imagist work, Des Imagistes.1632 Amy Lowell joined and rapidly came to dominate the group, advocating
a looser definition of Imagism which conflicted strongly with Pound‟s rigorous poetic discipline. Pound
left the group for the more radical Vorticists, and Lowell published the remaining Imagist anthologies
under the title Some Imagists Poets in 1915, 1916 and 1917.1633 By this point the momentum of the
movement was all but spent, although its proclivity for concreteness, objectivity, directness and selfsufficiency would remain influential, and is almost certainly felt in some of the poetry we may
legitimately categorise as minimalist.
1628
Recalling Danto‟s insight that mimetic theories of art seek to render their media transparent, while theories
which claim that art produces reality itself, maintain the opacity of their constituent media (Danto, Transfiguration,
159), it is somewhat paradoxical that Hulme should insist that poetry is capable of both simultaneously: it must
relate to the external world, making the Real more perceptible, while reaching for this perceptibility through the
indirect means of analogy. The negative observation, that plain speaking is unclear, does not justify the claim that
metaphor (since it is apparently in opposition to plain speaking) is capable of clarifying the Real in the manner
suggested by Hulme.
1629
Kermode, Romantic Image, 133-5; 139-140.
1630
Ibid., 178.
1631
Peter Jones, “Introduction,” Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 15-6 (13-43). The
review spoke in derogatory terms of the Poet‟s Club of which Hulme was a member.
1632
The principal poets of Imagism are H.D., Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, and the numerous
other poets associated with the movement, some more legitimately than others, include T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint,
Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Skipwirth Cannell, Allen Upward, John Cournos,
Marianne Moore, John Gould Fletcher, and D. H. Lawrence.
1633
See Jones, Introduction, 15-6.
281
Its manifestos lay out clear objectives for poetry: “[d]irect treatment of the „thing‟...absolutely no word
that d[oes] not contribute...[and], regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in
the sequence of the metronome.”1634 Held together by a doctrine of the image – which is conceived by
Hulme as an intuition of the Real, and by Pound‟s as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time”1635 – these principles are made manifest in a poetry which, in Hughes‟
paraphrase, is marked by “[h]ardness of outline, clarity of image, brevity, suggestiveness, freedom from
metrical laws.”1636 Consider Pound‟s “In a Station of the Metro,” by some way the poet‟s most austere
Imagist poem, an evocative miniature which illustrates these attributes with subtle force:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
1637
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Here is presented a singular instant – one differentiated from a generic multitude; a clarification and
intensification of the ordinary; a poetic subtraction which repeats and amplifies Pound‟s claim regarding
the image. In these lines we may trace those microscopic poetic points upon which the haziness of the
reader‟s imagination tips into the crystalline hardness of the image. At this point the represented image is
indeed an “apparition,” something which leaves the realm of the undifferentiated and enters a space of
intense presence, mediating in this poietic intuition a deep experience of its concreteness. This is also the
point at which the indiscernible part of identity shifts into the specificity of “these faces.” Imagist poetry
provides clarity – it recognises those faces as these faces – but not by rendering the strange familiar, or by
forcing anonymity into the form of a homonym. The point at which the image seems most intimate, is
also the one where the hardness of the poem is reaffirmed: the “petals” are most significant when their
ephemeral singularity is rendered almost transparent, stuck against the “bough,” a symbol of both stability
and a certain inflexibility. The hardness of the poem reaffirms that the world does not give itself over to
simple domestication; the image reveals an aspect of the world which is strictly impenetrable1638 and, in
this sense, alterity is affirmed as that which guards the Real against the reduction of concrete poiesis to
prosaic equivalence, to recall Hulme.
1634
F.S. Flint, “Imagisme,” Imagist Poetry, 129 (129-130).
Ezra Pound, “A Few Don‟ts By An Imagist,” Imagist Poetry, 130 (130-4).
1636
Hughes, Imagist and the Imagists, 4.
1637
Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” Imagist Poetry, 95.
1638
From the Imagist perspective, this part is what is approximated by the image which, in turn, is intuited by poetry.
1635
282
That that poem manipulates the pace of our perception1639 is confirmed by examining its tempo and
rhythms. Like all Imagism it abandons regular metre, but this is not to say it is arrhythmic. The first line
divides into three accelerating figures – “the apparition,” “of these faces,” and “in the crowd” – followed
by a significant retardation in the second line. The figures of the first line consist respectively of five, four
and three syllables. The initial figure begins with an isolated unstressed syllable (“The”) followed by the
rapid-fire tetrasyllabic “apparition.” It continues with a second tetrasyllabic foot (“of these faces”), the
assymetrical “of these” followed by a stressed then an unstressed syllable (“faces”). The final unstressed
syllable carries its momentum into the anapaest which closes the line (“in the crowd”). The caesura here
resides in the verbal arrangement of the poem on one level – the colon which punctuates the line-break is
strengthened by the slow transition between the heavy, voiced plosive (“d”) at the end of the first line, and
unvoiced plosive (“p”) which begins the second.1640 It is also a poietic caesura inasmuch as the strength of
the image is conveyed by the metaphor formalised in the second part of the poem. Somewhat hesitantly,
the second line opens with the syncopated iamb, “Petals,” then briefly accelerates in the central anapaestic
foot (“on a wet”), ending with a progressive ritardando in the two final stressed syllables (“black
bough”).1641
This brief account of some of the poem‟s technicalities is not offered anecdotally, but in support of
Kermode‟s observation that, for Hulme, “the meaning [of the poem] is the same thing as its form, and the
artist is absolved from participation with the discursive powers of the intellect.”1642 I believe this may be
generalized to the best Imagism. Whether it is the image which determines the technicalities of poetic
language, or vice versa, is less significant than the recognition that the two are inextricable in the poem.
In this particular sense, the Imagist poem perpetuates the self-reflexive strain established by the Jena
romantics.
1639
This recalls Šklovskij‟s understanding that “the poetic image…aims to destroy the tendency towards habituation
and serves to lengthen and intensify the process of perception” (D. W. Fokkema and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of
Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics (London: C. Hurst,
1978), 15-6), as well as Luhmann‟s claim that art is effective through a “retarding [of] perception” (Luhmann, Art
as Social System, 14). It should be noted that, contra Hulme and several of the Imagists, the formalists express no
interest in the metaphysical elevation of the image.
1640
The change here in the point of articulation – from the back, dorsal, “d” to the front, bilabial “p” – necessitates a
physical adjustment whenever the poem is sounded, regardless, I believe, of whether this is done aloud or mentally.
It is intensely difficult to imagine these sounds following each other significantly more quickly than they can be
articulated out loud. Quite simply, this adjustment takes time. The same sort of phenomenon may be noted in the
final three words of the poem – “wet,” “black,” and “bough” – between the alveolar “t” and the velar which end
“wet” and “black,” and the bilabial “b” which begins “black” and “bough.”
1641
It might be argued that the line ends with a spondee, but to my mind, given that the poem‟s tempo is decreasing,
it makes more sense to see these syllables as separate.
1642
Kermode, Romantic Image, 143. Once again, this point bears a striking resemblance to the critical
pronouncements of several minimalists.
283
Despite this desire for unity between form and content, and despite its being a thoroughly visual poetry –
Hulme emphasizes the visual and physical nature of the Image – the Imagists experiment very little with
concrete form. Notable exceptions are the patterned lines of Marianne Moore‟s wonderfully titled “You
Are Like the Realistic Product of an Idealistic Search for Gold at the Foot of the Rainbow,” and the
minimal, clipped couplets of much of William Carlos Williams‟ work,1643 which draw significant
attention to the physical spaces between words, lines and stanzas. We nonetheless encounter intensely
visual examples of a different order in this poetry. One might only think of the remarkable second stanza
of H.D.‟s “Evening:”
The cornel-buds are still white,
but the shadows dart
from the cornel-roots –
black creeps from root to root,
each, leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
1644
and leaf-shadow are lost.
Other poets render the image knowable through plain lines – austere, hard, and descriptive. The opening
of Aldington‟s “Pickett” is exemplary in this respect:
Dusk and deep silence…
Three soldiers huddle on a bench
Over a red-hot brazier,
And a fourth who stands apart
1645
Watching the cold rainy dawn.
These lines are interesting for the minimalist sensibility they demonstrate – this could be a passage of
Hemingway‟s, Robbe-Grillet‟s or Carver‟s prose, merely shaped into verse – but more especially for the
manner in which the image is rendered static through description, while the passage of time between two
instants (“dusk” and “dawn”) is given a dynamism through its absence: time is accelerated by a
1643
William Carlos Williams writes his best Imagist poetry after the demise of the movement, and many argue that
this work already demonstrates considerable affinity with objectivism (Jones, Introduction, 36-7).
1644
H.D., “Evening,” Imagist Poetry, 63.
1645
Richard Aldington, “Pickett,” Imagist Poetry, 57. Similar, although not as bare or focused as Aldington‟s poem,
is Lowell‟s “Spring Day” (the poem is arguably more Impressionistic than it is Imagistic).
284
symmetrical lack of presentation of actual and textual silence, reinforced by ellipsis and the physical
space between stanzas. At other times, the clarity of the image is sought through an evocative
synaesthesia, as exemplified in the wonderful penultimate line of Amy Lowell‟s “In a Garden” – “And
the scent of lilacs was heavy with stillness.”1646
d) Futurism and the poignancy of direction
The Imagist concern lies with presenting the Real, minimally mediated by a poetic language focused on
accurate description, simple lines, divested of the need for exegesis and any lyrical excess. In this sense, it
is formally minimalist.1647 Yet this is seldom the case in practice, on top of which the retrospective
idealism of the Imagists seems able to attend to the unyielding acceleration of the early twentieth century
only obliquely. Concurrently, other projects expressed a far greater urgency and militant orientation
towards the future, grounding themselves in a dynamic revolutionary affirmation that aesthetic novelty
and the demolition of exhausted values1648 would constantly replenish one another in an exhilarating and
infinite affirmation of existence: “once again we hurl defiance to the stars,”1649 in the celebrated terms of
Marinetti. Marjorie Perloff (in a phrase she adopts from Renato Poggioli1650) identifies this as the futurist
moment – a moment of extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo, generic to any revolutionary avantgarde; a moment which tips into a militant utopianism and pledge of fidelity towards futurity itself; a
moment at which artists are convinced that something entirely new is imminent.
The start of the twentieth century saw groups of young artists – deeply dissatisfied with the stagnation and
complacency of the establishment in its various social, political and cultural guises1651 – take on coherent
programmes, defining a number of concurrent movements. The principal among these are Cubism, Italian
Futurism, Russian Futurism and Vorticism.1652 To comprehend both the importance and difficulties of the
futurist moment as it manifests in these movements, it is necessary to juxtapose Perloff‟s observation, that
1646
Amy Lowell, “In a Garden,” Imagist Poetry, 87.
By these criteria, Pound‟s In a Station of the Metro is certainly a minimalist poem.
1648
Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and
Anthology (Ottowa: U of Ottawa P, 1980) 3-4; Jane Rye, Futurism (London: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 11.
1649
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Manifesto, 189 (185-189).
1650
Perloff adopts this phrase, and its relatively broad application, from work of Renato Poggioli (Marjorie Perloff,
The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago and London: U of
Chicago P, 1986), xvii.
1651
Folejewski, Futurism and its Place, 5.
1652
There were significant futurist experiments in other parts of Europe, and as far afield as Brazil, which are
bracketed for the sake of brevity.
1647
285
in these is “produced a short-lived but remarkable rapprochement between avant-garde aesthetic, radical
politics, and popular culture,”1653 with Agamben‟s cautionary remark, that “where there is movement
there is always a caesura that cuts through and divides the people...identifying an enemy.” 1654 It is not
surprising that an aggressive utopianism should flirt with proto-fascist rhetoric. Still, the extent of the
horror which Marinetti‟s exalted prophesy – that war is the “world‟s only hygiene”1655 – provokes in
hindsight, could not realistically have been predicted in 1909. As Sellin notes, the glorification of war and
violence was common to the major poets of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism and appears in
numerous works of Apollinaire, Marinetti, Tzara, Mayakovsky and Breton.1656 A sense of crisis
dominated the existential mood, and those who appealed to this futurist moment were convinced that an
aggressive aesthetic stance could project itself beyond catastrophe. Indeed Futurism only “makes a degree
of sense as a willed aesthetic attitude,”1657 when it expresses a will to art.1658
In its various expressions, this futurist moment is marked by a shared assertion of simultaneism as the
nucleus of modernist aesthetics. Art attempts to capture the dynamic situation in which sensory
information, and the forms and media which convey this information, can be presented concurrently –
whether by a synaesthesia, a logic of formal interpenetration, the innovative aesthetics of performance, or
collage. Thus, for simultaneists the “juxtaposition, within the same construct, whether visual or verbal [or,
indeed, musical], of different time frames”1659 is concurrent with an “interpenetrative spatial disruption
[which] is supposed to represent the affective character of the spectator‟s perceptual experience.” 1660
Speed and noise, youth and vigour, excitement and innovation, technological acceleration and urban
growth seem to propel existence itself forward.1661 At times simultaneism even promises a sort of utopian
politics, an aesthetically generated collective consciousness.1662 Given the stakes, it is not surprising that
1653
Perloff, Moment, xvii.
Agamben, “Movement.”
1655
Marinetti, “Manifesto,” 187. This coordinates closely his view of the aesthetic as a site of “struggle” (ibid., 187)
upon which poetry is a “violent attack on unknown forces” (ibid., 187) and “art...can be nothing but violence,
cruelty, and injustice” (ibid., 189).
1656
Eric Sellin, Reflections on the Aesthetics of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism: A Prosody Beyond Words
(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1993), 23.
1657
Ibid.
1658
Ibid., 19. Sellin takes this term from Andras Hamori, who understands it as that which marks aesthetic from
merely decorative objects, but it generates an obvious comparison to Nietzsche‟s Will to Power (See Rye, Futurism,
11).
1659
Perloff, Moment, 174.
1660
Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1994), 147.
1661
Ibid., 139. Marinetti, “Manifesto,” 186-9; Rye, Futurism, 11, 121.
1662
Butler, Early Modernism, 158-9.
1654
286
there exists some disagreement as to the origin of the term,1663 its conceptual debts,1664 and over its
applicability or inapplicability to various artists and movements.1665
According to Butler, where Cubism “value[s] formalism for its own sake...[the Italian]
Futurists...demanded involvement and commitment.”1666 In formal terms, Cubism – along with
Constructivism and De Stijl – are certainly the forebears of an abstract expressionism which establishes
the nonreferential conditions in which minimalism‟s radically reductive aesthetic could come to
prominence.1667 Are the excesses of Futurism antithetical to this conceptual course? May we suppose that
the Futurist proposition that “EVERYTHING OF VALUE IS THEATRICAL,”1668 together with its
proclivity for “improvisation, [and] lightning-like intuition,”1669 are opposed to formalism, and hence also
to minimalism, which is regularly conceived of as formalism‟s extreme pole? Futurism emphasizes a shift
from a distanced, passive, respectful obedience in relation to the work, to one of unbroken closeness and
continuous participation,1670 once again affirming its overtly political dimension. In Butler‟s judgement,
“the spectator is involved in the struggle, because [the work‟s] depiction turns upon a rhythmic
interdependence between subject, object, and environment.”1671 Yet this theatricality does not bar it from
minimalism.
Indeed, Hal Foster, reminds us that “minimalism breaks with late modernism through a partial reprise of
the historical avant-garde,”1672 and although we overstate the case by conflating the two, we might also
recall that in his 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,” Fried views minimalism as an anti-art precisely on
account of its theatricality.1673 For Fried, “the literalist [minimalist] espousal of objecthood amounts to
1663
Ibid., 158.
Marinetti denies the influence of Mallarmé on his typographical experiments (Perloff, Moment, 175; Rye,
Futurism, 115) much as Apollinaire fails to acknowledge Marinetti as a model for his calligrams (Butler, Early
Modernism, 152-3; 157).
1665
Robert Delaunay, “Simultaneism in Contemporary Modern Art, Painting, Poetry,” Manifesto, 160-3.
1666
Butler, Early Modernism, 152.
1667
In relation to the Constructivist tradition, Foster suggests that minimalism is “one site of a general return of this
avant-garde – a return that, with the force of the repressed, opened up the disciplinary order of late modernism”
(Foster, Return, 56).
1668
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra, “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre,” Manifesto,
193.
1669
Ibid., 194.
1670
This is the sixth conclusion of the Futurists programme to revivify theatre (ibid., 196).
1671
Butler, Early Modernism, 147.
1672
Foster, Return, 54.
1673
Admittedly, Fried‟s view regarding the confluence of theatricality and aesthetic absorption is rendered a great
deal clearer when understood in terms of his situation within an historical counterpoint between the autonomous
presentness of high modernism and the rather more exhibitionary notion of presence which marks much of the art
which subsequently would be called postmodernist.
1664
287
nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art.”1674 Whatever
art might be, it must be harboured in the epiphanic potential of the work itself, which minimalism, by this
account, hands over too completely to the beholder, and hence to a sort of theatre.1675 If his
characterization is legitimate, minimalism certainly shares its theatricality with Futurism. Not
insignificantly, the Futurists themselves envision their synthetic theatre as a type of minimalism in which
performances would be “very brief,” aiming “[t]o compress into a few minutes, into a few words and
gestures, innumerable situations, sensibilities, ideas, sensations, facts, and symbols.”1676 This resembles
the attitude often espoused by critics of minimalist literature, that their objects are the containers of
compressed meaning in which “everything said must contain all that has not been said.”1677 “It’s stupid to
write one hundred pages where one would do,”1678 in the words of Marinetti.
The Futurist partiality towards “ABSOLUTE DYNAMISM”1679 sets it against the traditional business of
form – ensuring stability and predictability, differentiating and mediating the chaotic stuff of what is
unformed. Returning to the three existential logics of transumption introduced earlier, might we say that a
formalist aesthetic contains the object, while Futurism – which extends our conception of artwork from
within the heterogeneous, interpenetrative nexus of elements from which it is constituted – operates by a
logic of distension? This is by no means an unreasonable suggestion. Yet, as minimalism shows with
particular clarity, that a work appeals primarily to one logic does not prohibit its secondary involvement
with another logic (or other logics). For instance, while formalism is a model of order for the serial, wallmounted boxes of Judd‟s oeuvre (Figure 87),1680 or for the rigorously prescribed, mathematically coded
movement of Beckett‟s “Quad I” (Figure 88), this is not the case for the sublime, interpenetrative
atmospheres generated by Dan Flavin‟s celebrated installation of variously coloured lights on the spiral
walkway of the Guggenheim Museum, (Figure 89),1681 or of Philip Glass‟s Strung Out (Figure 90),1682
which recalls Futurist and Dada performance through the manner in which the music is arranged across
1674
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 125.
Ibid.
1676
Marinetti, Settimelli and Corra, “Synthetic Theatre,” 191.
1677
Hallett, Minimalism, 7.
1678
Marinetti, Settimelli and Corra, “Synthetic Theatre,” 193.
1679
Ibid., 194.
1680
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966. Collection unspecified.
The work comprises four cubic units of stainless steel with amber Plexiglass sides.
1681
Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Ward Jackson, and old friend and colleague who, when, during Fall, 1957, I finally
returned to New York from Washington, and joined him to work together in this museum, kindly communicated),
1971. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
1682
Philip Glass, Strung Out, 1967.
1675
288
the stage, requiring the performer to engage in a type of slow, ritualistic dance, as he or she moves from
beginning to end.
Figure 87: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966.
Figure 88: Samuel Beckett, Quad (still from colour version), 1981.
289
Figure 89: Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Ward Jackson, an old friend and colleague who, when, during
Fall, 1957, I finally returned to New York from Washington, and joined him to work together in this
museum, kindly communicated), 1971.
Figure 90: Premiere performance by Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild of Philip Glass’ Strung Out,
November 1968, New York.
290
We might extract two mildly comforting aesthetic maxims from this situation: mistrust any activity which
overhastily gives names to artistic movements; and have faith in the universalizing potential of poietic
logic (in relation to the artwork). Regarding the first, in naming their activities, artists and critics
habitually claim to do things which, in fact, they do not or cannot accomplish. The second, fortunately,
shows that this does not matter very much, because any artwork might manifest according to apparently
disparate poietic logics – logics which are themselves devoid of determinate content, but which deepen
our awareness of the relation of an artwork to poiesis, and of poiesis to the Real. In this light,
simultaneism names a poietic logic1683 which permeates aesthetic works in appealing to a futurist
moment, even though these moments may be quite different.1684
There can be little doubt that Cubism, which was an accepted term by early 1912,1685 owes the
simultaneist thrust of its aesthetic to Italian Futurism. The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little
Jeanne of France,1686 the collaborative masterpiece of poet Blaise Cendrars and his wife, painter Sonia
Delaunay,1687 is a pioneering work of simultaneism not, according to Butler, on the basis of the
“associative juxtaposition within the verbal text,” but “upon its interaction with the painting...which
accompanies it.”1688 In this, it recalls the symbiosis of William Blake‟s poetry and illustration, and
anticipates the work of Max Ernst, such as The Hundred Headless Woman.1689 However its semantic
concerns are also plainly Futurist: its subject is a journey of initiation of the sixteen-year-old poet, filled
with a confused superabundance of violent, erotic, irrational and revolutionary energy. Establishing that
the simultaneist effect of Cendrar‟s poem owes more to the manner in which the visual and verbal
elements extend one another – rather than to the internal, self-referential arrangement of its verbal
elements, points from a logic of containment to one of distension – recognizing a dynamic poietic field
which is atopian insofar as it escapes any simple location.
1683
To recall, the present work regards simultaneism, or simultaneity, as one of the characteristic situations of the
logic of distension.
1684
Might minimalism not present a futurist moment of sorts in the way it present a radical view of the minimal
distinction of art from mere thing, and the transfiguration of the latter to the former, in the terms of Danto (Danto,
Transfiguration, 99).
1685
Scobie, Earthquakes, 47.
1686
Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delauney, “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France,” PMV1,
161-172.
1687
They were strongly associated with Cubists. Robert Delaunay, Sonia‟s brother, was the leading Orphist.
1688
Butler, Early Modernism, 161-2.
1689
Max Ernst, The Hundred Headless Woman (New York, George Braziller, 1981).
291
Apollinaire – the self-appointed spokesman of the Cubists1690 – identifies four principal routes of Cubist
expression: scientific cubism, which expresses internalised geometric principles; physical cubism, which
coordinates its elements through visual perception; instinctive cubism, which is informed by intuition;
and orphic cubism, which is “the art of painting new structures out of elements which have not been
borrowed from the visual sphere, but have been created entirely by the artist himself, and been endowed
by him with fullness of reality.”1691 In Apollinaire‟s view, simultaneism takes on its full force in light of
the aesthetic objectives of Orphism. “[W]orks...must simultaneously give a pure aesthetic pleasure, a
structure which is self-evident, and a sublime meaning.”1692 Here is an anticipation of the aesthetic
extreme that will manifest in terms of minimalism as soon as the unmediated presence, self-reflexive
transparency and sublime effect for which Apollinaire campaigns, are pressed towards a greater level of
abstraction and an austere approach to aesthetic medium.
In practice, despite that fact that he “deplored the Futurists,”1693Apollinaire‟s visual poetry reveals their
significant influence.1694 If many of these poems appeal to a traditional calligrammatic logic1695 – words
formed into a single icon or sign, their “textual values...read against the visual imprint of a shape whose
referential frame inflects the entire text”1696 – others attempt to generate a syntax of signs.1697The force at
the heart of the visual poem is increasingly located within the concrete visual and structural relation of the
words themselves, rather than in the iconic relation of word to image. Drawing on the technique of
collage – which moves beyond the early Cubist analytical delineation of space in relation to objects, to a
“synthesis or building up of separate objects on the picture plane”1698 – Apollinaire claimed to offer a
“new representation of the universe, [t]he most poetic and the most modern.”1699 Indeed, what sets
Apollinaire apart from his predecessors, and provides impetus to the subsequent visual poetry of high
Modernism, is his sensitivity to the capacity of his medium to generate new interartistic topoi. The proper
medium of “Horse Calligram” (Figure 91) is neither visual nor verbal; nor is it a simple composite of the
1690
Scobie, Earthquakes, 46.
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Cubism Differs,” Manifesto, 124.
1692
Ibid. See Scobie, Earthquakes, 128-9.
1693
Butler, Early Modernism, 152.
1694
Ibid., 155, 157; Folejewski, Futurism and its Place, 5; Bohn, Visual Poetry, 14-5. This is particularly true of
Apollinaire‟s Calligrammes, published in 1918, the year after his death.
1695
Apollinaire claimed that to compare his calligrams to the figurative poetry of the Renaissance was like
comparing a racing car to a wind-up toy (Bohn, Visual Poetry, 14-6).
1696
Drucker, “Visual Performance,” 134.
1697
Scobie, Earthquakes, 73-4; Johanna Drucker, “Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry: A Note on Historical
Context and Basic Concepts,” EVC, 39-40.
1698
Butler, Early Modernism, 167. “[T]he Cubist painter...decomposed an object into its parts, seen from different
angles, and regrouped them in two-dimensional patterns” (Bohn, Visual Poetry, 17).
1699
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Horse Calligram,” PMV1, 119.
1691
292
two. Its concern lies with the production of something entirely new, which Apollinaire believed would be
discovered through the simultaneism exposed by collage. This is certainly an exaggerated claim. It is true
that such works as “Horse Calligram” present skilful examples of an “„autoillustration,‟ which makes
words take on the visual form of an object,”1700 and that these works involve an accelerated notation and
reading in which “connections made by movements of the eye are supposed to inspire an innovatory type
of inference.”1701 However, as Bann notes, that “lines of text are ingeniously manipulated in order to
imitate natural appearances,”1702 should not persuade us of the concreteness of such works in the strong
sense of the “parallel development of structure and content,”1703 of sense, concept, medium and meaning.
Nor were these concerns unique to Apollinaire: historical precedents abound, most notably in the case of
the Arabic tughra, while Apollinaire‟s contemporaries, Cendrars, Marinetti and Cangiullo, express similar
interests.1704
Figure 91: Guillaume Apollinaire, Horse Calligram, 1918.
1700
Butler, Early Modernism, 170.
Ibid.
1702
Stephen Bann, “Introduction,” CPIA, 11 (7-27).
1703
Ibid., 16.
1704
Ibid., 166; Bohn, Visual Poetry, 16-7.
1701
293
Aesthetically more significant is “Lettre-Océan” (Figure 92),1705 a “psychovisual collage”1706 which
reveals Apollinaire‟s work at its perceptually most dynamic and its conceptually most profound. The
poem takes its title from postal terminology, a letter sent across the ocean, between Apollinaire in
bourgeois Paris, and his brother, Albert, in a politically unstable Mexico City.1707 Three principal visual
figures emerge in the poem. The first is the postcard, marked by the stamp and wave-like postmarks,
which is a partial reconstruction of narrative fragments exchanged between the brothers.1708 The second,
the larger of the circular figures, on the right side of the poem, is a representation of the Eiffel Tower
from above, marked by the verbal transcription of the tower‟s height: “Haught de 300 metres” (“Height of
300 metres”).1709 From this point the sounds of the city fan outward in expanding concentric circles, from
the sound of factory sirens (“hou”), to that of an autobus (“rro, o o to ro ro ro”); the sound of a
gramophone (its “zzz” and fragmentary catches of melody) and the creak of the poet‟s new shoes (“cre”),
presumably as he walks through the city.1710 Combining the visual and auditory perception with the poet‟s
thought,1711 the poem, embodied by the tower, “radiates lines of words”1712 which on one level represent
the transmission of radio waves or telegraphic messages1713 but, on another, establish the poem, as a
“symbolic axis mundi:”1714 “[w]ith the location of the poem at its centre, the action radiates outward...to
encompass the arrondissiment, the city, the nation, the continent, and the whole world.”1715 The third
figure, the smaller of the two circular shapes to the bottom left, represents “a bunch of keys on a ring.”1716
At its centre is the topographical marker, “Sur la rive gauche devant le pont d’Iéna” (“on the Left Bank
opposite the Jena Bridge”). Bohn stresses that since this is the actual location of the Eiffel Tower, critics
habitually misinterpret this as a second representation of the tower.1717 According to Bohn, that these are
keys is “strengthened by the shape of several of the verses and by the line “Des clefs j’en ai vu mille et
1705
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Lettre-Océan,” Alcools et Calligrammes (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1991), 220-1.
This was in fact Apollinaire‟s first visual poem, and probably also his best.
1706
Bohn, Visual Poetry, 17.
1707
This was the time of the Mexican Revolution. This letter is made of several fragments which include a postcard,
but also a telegram, indicated by the letters “TSF (télégraphie sans fil, „wireless telegraphy‟)” (ibid., 15).
1708
Ibid., 19-21.
1709
Perloff, Moment, 196.
1710
Bohn, Visual Poetry, 18.
1711
Ibid., 22.
1712
Perloff, Moment, 196.
1713
Bohn, Visual Poetry, 20.
1714
Ibid., 23.
1715
Ibid.
1716
Ibid. 20.
1717
Ibid. 21. See Perloff, for example (Perloff, Moment, 196). Also, Bohn points out that the centre originally read
“la foule” (“the crowd”) (Bohn, Visual Poetry, 21).
294
mille” (“I have seen thousands and thousands of keys”)”, and, allegorically, by the fact that several of
these keys are political slogans “each of which claims to be the „key‟ to an ideal society”1718
Figure 92: Guillaume Apollinaire, Lettres-Océan (1918)
“The poem does not simply imitate an object,” notes Butler. “It can lead one to ask how the spatial
arrangement of a series of messages might affect their meaning.”1719 This resonates with Johanna
Drucker‟s description of concrete poetry in terms of the “work [which] has a distinct shape on the page
and loses a part of its meaning if it is rearranged or printed without attention to the typeface and form
which were part of the poet‟s original work.”1720 “Lettre-Océan” is thus amongst the founding gestures of
modern concretism. It also speaks of something purely poietic. The topography of Paris is
1718
Ibid.
Butler, Early Modernism, 171.
1720
Drucker, “Experimental,” 40.
1719
295
schematized,1721 displaced into words and visual design, manifesting a poietic atopia – a non-space which
is spatialized by its poietic taking-place, and which becomes concrete in this process of transumption.1722
To clarify, our suggestion is not that Apollinaire‟s calligrammatic poetry is minimalist, when clearly it
acts as the container of a great deal of complexity, but that it exemplifies through its simultaneist,
concrete mould an early modernist vision of the aesthetic transumption which is radicalized and
intensified by minimalists.
Led by Marinetti, the Italian Futurists amplify the simultaneist aesthetic in their work by vigorous generic
innovation.1723 Marinetti recognized and lauded the manner in which contemporary advertising and
journalism were restoring dynamism to stagnant aesthetic formulae.1724 Embracing several of these
techniques, the Futurists were also astute to the importance of public spectacle, staged impressive
spectacular performances, and quickly elevated the manifesto to the foremost avant-garde genre of the
day through their tireless dissemination of aesthetico-political propaganda.1725 The innovations they
brought to sound and visual poetry were considerable. Having abandoned “traditional syntax, metre and
punctuation,”1726 the Futurists were free to experiment with layout and typography. Marinetti‟s “After the
Battle of the Marne” (Figure 93)
1727
exemplifies this concern in terms of the use of different types and
sizes of lettering – recalling Mallarmé, it is true – and experiments with the collagic overlaying of texts.
This spirit extends to Marinetti‟s unorthodox use of colour, the incorporation of mathematical and
numerical symbols,1728 and its incorporation of sonic elements, whether onomatopoeic – the repeated “ta”
in “After the Battle”1729 – or orthographic – adding or subtracting from the number of vowels and
consonants in words.1730
1721
Bohn, Visual Poetry, 16.
This apparent paradox – that the poem becomes concrete by a process of abstraction – parallels Agamben‟s
model of the example which is “excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but, on the
contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 22).
1723
Perloff, Moment, xviii. Drucker draws attention to the notable influence on Italian Futurism of the aesthetics of
Symbolism and Cubism (Drucker, Visual Performance, 133).
1724
Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 49.
1725
Rye, Futurism, 17. As Butler notes, what the Futurists were doing was not entirely new; but it was made to seem
so by being accompanied by an aggressively dismissive view of all past solutions” (Butler, Early Modernism, 139).
1726
Ibid., 111.
1727
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, “After the Battle of the Marne, Joffre toured the front by car,” PMV1, 199. Its formal
and technical experimentation aside, the poem also reflects the frequent use of militaristic subject-matter by the
Futurists.
1728
“After the Battle” contains a numerical list in its left-hand corner, and incorporates the mathematical symbols +,
–, = and (ibid.).
1729
Ibid.
1730
“Mon amiiiii,” for example (ibid.) See Rye, Futurism, 111; Morley, Writing, 48-9.
1722
296
Figure 93: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, After the Battle of the Marne,
Joffre toured the front by car, 1914.
These experiments were captured in the phrase parole-in-liberta – words-in-freedom – through which
Marinetti sought a positive poetic response to the technological acceleration of modernity in which he
placed such great faith.1731 Free verse, Marinetti concluded, is not as free as it supposes.1732 Finally, it
reinforces the general imposition of limits upon the senses, affirming that the “structure of language
mirror[s] the oppressively hierarchical nature of society.”1733 Words-in-freedom, with all the formal,
linguistic, sonic and visual innovation they brought, were supposed to liberate the senses and emotions on
the one hand, and words themselves, on the other. “Words, which...had been held in the service of
communicating information, were to be re-imagined as material things in themselves...Rather than serving
as referents, they were now deemed self-illustrative, identified with their own aural and visual
properties.”1734
This experimental attitude, with its increased focus on the concreteness of the sign, spread rapidly across
Europe. It discovered significant resonances in the advanced intermedia experimentation of Russian
1731
Ibid., 48.
Perloff, Moment , 174.
1733
Morely, Writing, 47.
1734
Ibid., 48.
1732
297
poets,1735 and England, too, manifests a futurist moment in the work of the Vorticists.1736 That AngloAmerican critics have regularly mistaken the rhetorical animosity of the Vorticists towards Italian
Futurism for a reliable indicator of the former‟s autonomy from the latter, 1737 should not distract us from
the simple fact, as Perloff sees it, that “Vorticism would not have come into being without the Futurist
model.”1738Marinetti‟s aesthetic had a considerable impact on Pound,1739 who, to recall, had left the
Imagists for the Vorticists, and who considered “energy, force, dynamism...[and] simultaneity” 1740 –
distinctly Marinettian terms – central to his poetic vision.
“Its typographical and synthetic innovations were nevertheless startling,” 1741 suggests Perloff. In BLAST,
the publication through which the Vorticists disseminated their ideas and work, we encounter “a visual
format that recalls the advertising poster or billboard rather than the page to be consecutively read from
top to bottom and from left to right.”1742 Advertising, to be effective, must intensify and exploit the
economic dimension of the sign. By exploring this logic, the Vorticists progress towards a poetic
distinction of the minimal, nuclear element of this commercial semiotics. Despite its stylistic incongruity
with the exploits of BLAST, a similar concern is reflected in journalistic terms by the “emergence of a
more taut and bare prose style in the newspapers of the day…[which] reflected the sense of increased
velocity in daily life”1743 which is exemplified in the non-fictional writing of proto-minimalist Ernest
Hemingway.
The Vorticists integrate poetry, manifesto, experimental layout and illustration in an attempt to “give one
a sudden feeling of vertigo, of plunging into an abyss of space,”1744 “an acceleration into depth”1745 in
which the hope is to encounter “a radiant node or cluster.”1746 Led by Wyndham Lewis, they express an
often brutal and dystopian vision of the self-executing collapse of the modern world, triggered and
accelerated by the proliferation of technology, the diminution of the notion of value in a dehumanised
1735
The contribution of the Russian Futurists is discussed briefly in the examination of sound poetry below.
As with the Imagists (Imagistes), it was Pound who named the Vorticists.
1737
Perloff, Moment, 171.
1738
Ibid.
1739
Ibid., 175, 179, 184.
1740
Ibid., 174.
1741
Ibid., 163-4.
1742
Ibid., 181.
1743
Roston, Modernist Patterns, 128.
1744
Paul Overy, “Vorticism,” Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981) 108.
1745
Ibid. 107.
1746
Ezra Pound qtd. in Overy, ibid.
1736
298
world.1747 In this respect, Vorticism represents a cynical appropriation of the futurist moment: a curious
prospective retrospection in the sense that it seeks to stabilize a future catastrophe through a luminous
point in the poiesis of the present – a cautionary threnody of sorts.
e) An event between art and non-art
The First World War and its terrifying technologies of death sparked radical doubt in even the most
ardently utopian Futurist technophile. Within the choking dystopianism of collapsing empires and the
failing politics of a hollow humanism, Dada was born – choking on, then spitting out the art of the past,
and nourishing itself in the fervent belief that it was “essentially different.”1748 Dada resists positive
definition as thoroughly as it does negative definition: it can be clarified by no attribute or set of
attributes, nor by the fact that it lacks these. “The work of Dada,” suggests Welchman, “behave[s] more
like a variable than a constant.”1749 Deprived of a stable set of objects, we come closer to our object only
obliquely, by tracing the signifying force of Dada qua force, which, in Sanouillet‟s estimation, amounts to
installing the name, Dada, as logos.1750 “Dada was a word, a brand new, meaningless and magic
word,”1751 a prime word, in the terms of Marcel Duchamp, “which can be divided only by itself and by
unity.”1752
Dada intoxicates, not merely to confuse, but so that we can again experience, in the intense clarity of
critical sobriety, the problematic nature of “the accepted...referential function of sign systems.” 1753 As
Caws claims, Dada‟s “drunkenness...can deliver us from what Tristan Tzara – the figure most intimately
connected to the movement through its entire course – calls the „lazy habit‟ of living.”1754 Negation is
merely the necessary prelude to sublation and the revolutionary manifestation of poietic novelty: “„[w]hat
we wanted was to make a clean sweep of existing values, but also, in fact, to replace them with the
1747
Overy, “Vorticism,” 109.
Michel Sanouillet, “Dada: A Definition,” Dada Spectrum: The Dialectic of Revolt, ed. Stephen C. Foster and
Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison: Coda, 1979), 21.
1749
John. C. Welchman, “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse: Critical Theory and the Dada and Surrealist WordImage,” The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image, ed.Judi Freeman (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT, 1989) 60.
1750
Sanouillet, “Dada,” 21-2
1751
Ibid., 21.
1752
Ibid; Marc Dachy, Dada: The Revolt of Art, trans. Liz Ash (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 91-3.
1753
Hutcheon, Poetics, 142.
1754
Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism: Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Eluard and Desnos (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1970), 111.
1748
299
highest human values.‟”1755 Dada attempts to discover by anarchic means the radical point at which an
elemental or primal aesthetic1756 and a fundamental politics1757 can coincide. “[U]nder...[its] emblematic,
ironic and rather baffling name,1758 there came together an international constellation of artists, groups,
periodicals, books and works, radically affirming the freedom of man and the irrepressible claims of the
life impulse in all its manifestations.”1759 No-one, least of all its practitioners, was entirely sure where the
perimeters of their project lay, yet they were uniformly convinced “it was through art that Dada...[would
make] good its insurrection.”1760
Exposed by this conviction are two parallel fields of tension: the first between art and non-art, the second
between generation and destruction. Here art addresses not only its own existential conditions (in the first
case), but those of being in general (in the second). The stakes are high, and, unsurprisingly, the spectrum
of strong critical judgements ranges from the condemnation of Dada as an irretrievably nihilistic
enterprise,1761 to those dedicated to its heroic elevation.1762 Most convincing, however, are the accounts
which recognise in Dada a dialectic desire, an attempt to engender through its diverse expressions both
aesthetic and social revolution.
Dada‟s negotiation of the distinction of art from non-art, and relatedly, of the relationship between poiesis
and destruction, rests on the self-understanding that its primary task is to expose the very manner in which
the Real is shaped by a dialectic movement.1763 To recall, it is on the back of the dialectic that the modern,
progressivist vision of history comes up against the moment of dialectic self-consciousness at which
1755
Tristan Tzara, qtd. in Dachy, Dada, 34.
Ibid., 12; Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 12, 19. Hereafter DS.
1757
Dada opposed most political structures, and particularly forms of nationalism and authoritarianism (DS, 22-6,
28; Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism,” Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson,
1981), 120-1). Hereafter DSCMA. There is disagreement amongst critics as to the micro-politics of Dada. According
to Ades, the geographical and stylistic diversity of the artists suggests “no real unity” (ibid., 113), whereas
Sanouillet is adamant that Dada was “a group of people...[which] banded together their talents and energies to wage
an excruciating war against society as a whole” (Sanouillet, “Dada,” 23), resisting “the delusions of politics and
returning to bourgeois narrow-mindedness” (Dachy, Dada, 33). Dada‟s political mobility is further imputed in the
polemical use of the manifesto which “counter[s] any purely aesthetic interpretation of their work[...]” (Marc Dachy,
The Dada Movement: 1915-1923, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 8).
1758
For which dozens of competing explanations and histories have been offered, which, although interesting, are
excluded from the present discussion.
1759
Ibid., 7.
1760
Ibid.
1761
DS, 4.
1762
“Voicing its negation of the systems and forms of power opposed to life, Dada in the space of a few years
displayed a wild and creative energy, fundamentally positive in its thrust, and asserted the absolute supremacy of art
and life as experienced by free men” (Dachy, Dada Movement, 9).
1763
It was argued earlier that the dialectic view presents only a limited vision of the genuine forces which underpin
reality and are expressible in terms of ontology.
1756
300
history apparently comes to an end by grasping its own contingency. Dada aggressively rejects history
and the structures through which it is communicated, but it seems unable to move beyond historicity – the
force by which an entity emerges in the present with an awareness of its own contemporaneity, and so
exists in an implicit relation to the past it ostensibly negates, launching itself thus into the imminent
potentiality of the future. Inasmuch as it exemplifies the resilience of historicity, Dada also presents the
minimal condition for the type of closure which defines an historical situation as such. Sanouillet intuits
precisely this point when he writes that “with Dada, we live inside a closed world…The critic or the
historian can only write or talk about Dadaism and the Dadaists, not about Dada and the Dadas.”1764
“Dadaism created while Dada was destroying.”1765This is only an “apparent paradox,”1766 however, since
the poietic force – that force which the dialectic itself promises to harness – becomes visible only through
the maximal tension produced by a minimal contact, between the generic taking-place of the work –
Dadaism – and the anarchic singularity of the work itself – Dada.
Dada exemplifies a radical modernist aesthetic1767 in the very moment that it expresses its hostility to
modernism as a whole.1768Yet, as Lyotard insists in his examination of Duchamp, “[i]nconsistency is not
insignificance.”1769 Indeed, Dada‟s deliberate inconsistency is what marks it in relation to an event in
Badiou‟s sense of this term: an aleatory, trans-ontological rift; a subtraction from the existential state – a
negation which also posits something absolutely new. We might say that Dada‟s inconsistency acts as a
cipher to its eventality. It intuits this event through its irrational yet productive suspicion of any physical
or formal laws pertaining to aesthetics. These Dada judges as “arbitrary, random, „precise but inexact‟ (as
Duchamp says to Steefel), without any assignable reference. A self-referring law, a contract with
oneself...From the fact that the law is itself not legitimate...comes the result that you have no guarantee of
conforming to it.”1770 Dada is exceptional in the sense exposed by Agamben – it creates “a zone in which
application [of the law] is suspended, but the law…as such, remains in force.”1771 Here is a “moment of
vigorous conflict in the zoning of [aesthetic] practices.”1772
1764
Sanouillet, “Dada,” 25.
Ibid., 20.
1766
Ibid.
1767
Welchman takes note of the “critique and suspicion of several of the central items on the modernist agenda:
abstraction, autonomy, and utopian order” (Welchman, “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse,” 58).
1768
Ibid., 58-61; Dachy, Dada Movement, 8.
1769
Jean-François Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, trans. Ian McLeod (Venice, CA: Lapis, 1990), 12-3.
1770
Ibid., 22, 24.
1771
SE, 31.
1772
Welchman, “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse,” 60.
1765
301
Dada eludes and subverts discipline and genre,1773 and occasionally generates something entirely new.
From the manner of its emergence, which emphasizes simultaneously the eschewal of external causal
relation and mimetic reference, Dada reveals that its abiding concern is finally one of self-containment.
Its most intense poietic moment is also its most intimate, yet it plays by nobody‟s rules, least of all its
own.1774 Here are objects in search of a theory. However, since it is anarchic in relation to any aesthetic
norms, any such theory must extend from the innermost potentiality of the object itself. It is thus that
Dada “transforms art [itself], reinventing every discipline from within.”1775 Moving within the existential
ambit of the minimalist logic of transumption, and particularly its distensive and distributive modalities,
and claiming to be free from history, cause and telos, Dada represents itself as the decisive moment
within which objects are allowed to be just objects.1776 This is evident from Tzara‟s famous (if basic)
recipe for chance poetry – strips of text are cut from a source, placed in and then picked from a bag, and
then notated1777 – which dislocates poietic force from its original source, allowing it simply to take-place.
Equally we might look to the visual poetry of Raoul Hausmann (Figure 94),1778 or the “schematic
mecanomorph works,”1779 or machine portraits, of Francis Picabia (Figure 95)1780 to witness the
germination of a proto-minimalist expression of transumption unconstrained by tradition.
1773
In addition to its “radical interdiscursivity...in which the historically codified regimes of art practice” (ibid., 61)
– particularly genre and discipline – are significantly undermined, Welchman relates that Dada “militated against the
divisionism of nineteenth century practices: divisions of labor, divisions of academic and other disciplines, down to
the divisions between the arts and the dividing of art from non-art” (ibid.).
1774
“One might say the best criterion of a Dada piece is that it escapes definition” (Sanouillet, “Dada,” 26).
1775
Dachy, Dada, 14.
1776
This recalls the point raised above in relation to Sontag and Agamben.
1777
Nicholas Zurbrugg, “Towards the End of the Line: Dada and Experimental Poetry Today,” Dada Spectrum, 227.
1778
Raoul Hausmann, “Material for Painting, Sculpture, Architecture 1918,” 1918. Hausmann‟s “Material” is an
exemplary concrete poem (Dachy, Dada, 36-8) which presents the conceptual interaction of language, form and
geometric shape in an attempt to come to terms with that which constitutes aesthetic material. It reflects upon the
pull between positive space (the blue geometrical shapes and the black outlines of the typographically experimental
lettering) and negative space (the white spaces between shapes, and those rhythmic gaps between letters). Together,
these reflect the dynamism of constructed shapes, but also the manner in which syntax is propelled forward. In this
sense, Hausmann‟s actual subject is poiesis as it manifests in intermediary expression.
1779
Drucker, “Visual Performance,” 144.
1780
Poéme banal (Francis Picabia, Poéme banal (1918)), for instance, is “composed of text – a title, label, and
addendum – and diagram” (Welchman, “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse,” 92). According to Welchman, these
diagrams attempt to “represent[…] a kind of ultimate realism,” acting both as a theoretical blueprint and model of
practice, which “comes into being as the will-to-use, but…only exists to be modified, to be altered, or enacted, or
scratched” (ibid.). In concert with Attridge‟s argument that singularity is not of necessity inimitable or opposed to its
reproduction as such (Attridge, Singularity, 63-4), the machine diagram as conceived by Picabia is remarkable for
“the permission it grants to reproduce and to duplicate” (Welchman, “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse,” 92),
while acting as “a model for the highest order of denotative (one-to-one) exchange between word and image in
systems of representation.” (ibid.). The poem appeals to a logic of self-referential transumption precisely to the
extent that the potential for replication and execution which inhere in its design at once contain and distribute its
poietic heart.
302
Figure 94: Raoul Hausmann, Material for
Painting, Sculpture, Architecture 1918, 1918.
Figure 95: Francis Picabia, Poéme banal, 1918.
The manner of Dada‟s transumption is intensified as its concerns become increasingly abstract. There
persists in such cases the apparent paradox that the increased abstraction – indeed, minimization – of the
referential content of the work, is accompanied by its concrete physical, manifestation as an actual object.
Duchamp‟s ready-mades are exemplary in this respect. These are everyday objects, identified and
selected, divested of any particular significance, and then reinvested with aesthetic importance. Following
Danto, these are mere things transfigured into artworks,1781and have a different ontological status from
their prototypes.1782 Although qualitatively indistinguishable, the artwork is quantitatively more intense,
more knowable in terms of the taking-place of the Real. A prototypically minimalist gesture, the
readymade augments that element of Dada which Tzara characterizes in terms of an art more art.1783 The
readymade reaches towards an art more Real. Dada re-exposes a fundamental shift in the modern
conception of realism, from a faithful reflection of the natural world to the location of an essential poietic
element which is coincidental with the Real.1784 The Surrealists1785 – many of whom initially considered
1781
Danto, Transfiguration, 149.
Ibid., 99.
1783
Dachy, Dada Movement, 8.
1784
For leading Dadaist, Hugo Ball, this entails an investment in an aesthetic anti-naturalism in order to expose
something almost super-natural at the heart of art (DS, 19).
1782
303
themselves Dadaists – were convinced that they had discovered and could bring to light the very force of
poiesis which the Dadaists had intuited only negatively.1786 This poietic force is reflected in the term
surreal itself, which “has two meanings: more-real, and more-than real.”1787 The Surrealist project revives
a waning Platonism, particularly in the case of Magritte, for whom “thought is…a universal, originary
process, the raw material of all expression and activity, conditioning language and image alike.” 1788 It is
on this quasi-transcendental basis that Surrealism claims to subsume within a sphere of poetic unity1789
“the clash of signification at the interface of different codes,”1790 containing under the sign of poetry1791
any number of disciplines, media and genres.
Although the rhetoric of Dada rejects the sort of unifying gesture of thought which the Surrealists
embrace, there can be little doubt that they are similarly comprised of heterogeneous elements, and that
this heterogeneity is finally regarded as the substance of reality, rendering what is real in a significant
sense indistinguishable from what is more-real. Consider Duchamp‟s most celebrated readymade,
Fountain (Figure 96).1792 This work sets in motion a startling dynamic, problematizing the distinction of
art from non-art, and, in so doing, invigorating the relation of the readymade to the Real. To test the
aesthetic resolve of a supposedly open forum for contemporary art in New York,1793 Duchamp submitted
this work under the pseudonym Richard Mutt – a urinal, roughly signed on one side, which in any
situation is a symbol of a deeply awkward conjunction of the private and the public.1794 When the urinal
becomes art, and when the gallery becomes a public toilet, we might legitimately suggest that a certain
1785
Surrealism – which is antithetical to minimalism inasmuch as it seeks to demonstrate that the essence of art
resides in elements of meaning not transparent to consciousness, and which must be uncovered through the various
techniques of automatism (DSCMA, 124-5) – is for the most part bracketed in the present study.
1786
Ades‟ account is typical of this pole of thinking: “Surrealism was born out of a desire for positive action, to start
to build again from the ruins of Dada” (ibid., 121).
1787
Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2004),
319.
1788
Welchman, “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse,” 83.
1789
Ibid., 84.
1790
Ibid., 82.
1791
Ibid., 84.
1792
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. There is some dispute as to whether Dada should be dated from the first
readymades produced by Duchamp in 1913 and the subsequent association in New York of Duchamp, Picabia and
Man Ray, or to the establishment of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (and the association of Tzara, Ball, Arp,
Huelsenbeck, Richter, Hennings and Janco). Ades and Caws endorse the former (DSCMA, 111; DS, 10-1; Mary Ann
Caws, “Dada‟s Temper: Our Text,” Dada Spectrum, 219-225), while Dachy clearly prefers the Zurich Dadaists as
founders of the movement (Dachy, Dada Movement 8-9; Dachy, Dada, 28).
1793
DS, 11.
1794
The traditionally private act of urination takes place in a public space – separated from ordinary space, it is true,
but where people nonetheless go to do that which is private together. The individual urinal – as opposed to the
trough-like ones which one might still encounter in more rustic public toilets – restores a symbolic, though not
actual, element of privacy to the act.
304
revolution of a concept has taken place. For the present, the question of particular significance, however,
is whether or not the Real resides with greater intensity in the real thing (the urinal) or in the readymade
(the urinal as artwork). Inasmuch as the Real is actually indifferent to the mode of its presentation, the
question is meaningless; but insofar as we are dealing with existential intensities – which is the actual
quantitative wager on the term more-real – we are obliged to note that the artwork is in an important
sense more-real than the simple urinal.
Figure 96: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.
Regarding the transfiguration of non-art to art, Duchamp explains that the artistic status of the readymade
rests on a generative dynamic governed by choice. From this choice, a new concept, context and name for
the work are able to establish themselves. “[The artist] CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so
that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for
that object.”1795 The resonances with Danto‟s argument regarding the transfiguration of mere things to art
are striking. Although Danto‟s primary examples are taken from Pop and minimalism, it is arguably the
Dada readymade which presents modernism‟s most intense moment, an event in relation to which such
transfiguration itself becomes commonplace. Danto recognizes that since it is possible that an artwork be
1795
Marcel Duchamp qtd. Dachy, Dada, 71. Richard Wollheim offers an interesting discussion of the manner in
which this emphasis on decision redefines the concept of the artwork (Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” 396).
305
entirely perceptually indiscernible from an everyday object,1796 the distinction of art from non-art must be
sought elsewhere than in the qualities of the entity in question.1797 Without denying the significance of
context,1798 or of the formal sanction provided by the institutions of the artworld,1799 art presses beyond
both the aesthetic question of representation and the contextual question of historical emergence. There is,
for Danto, an ontological distinction to be made between art and non-art.1800
The present claim is that the ontological differentiation of art from non-art owes to the fact that the former
is quantitatively more-real than the latter – at very least insofar as it exemplifies the rules it prescribes for
itself. “[E]ach example,” Danto suggests, “constitutes a sort of ontological argument in favour of its own
designation.”1801
Furthermore,
as
Danto
notes,
when
“„real‟
is
used
in
contrast
with
representation...[s]omething is „real‟ when it satisfies a representation of itself.”1802 It is the capacity of art
to abstract itself from within the undifferentiated profusion of reality which marks it as Real. As we have
seen, the Real – defined by the fact that some quantity irreversibly takes-place – conditions the possibility
of reality. Paradoxically, reality‟s primary reference is not the Real in this sense, but to the relations
which exist between entities through which their qualities become visible. An art of the Real –
exemplified by the readymade, and more clearly even by minimalism – abstracts itself from such relation
through an act of self-aggregation: it limits the significance of its own qualities and content, and stresses
as its defining moment the raw facticity of its taking-place as art. What follows such an object in terms of
meaning and significance, although easily mistaken as essential, is in fact coincidental to that which
renders the object Real.
In relation to the Real, Fountain confronts us with a radical type of aesthetic abstraction. It is not
concerned with the deconstitution or distillation of form, structure, content or medium. 1803 Here
abstraction is inseparable from the force of manifestation itself. It continues the work of poietic
concretism begun by Mallarmé – confirming a certain symmetry between the event by which poiesis
becomes concrete and eventality itself. Where Duchamp differs in this respect, is that the readymade
1796
Danto, Transfiguration, 6, 43, 143.
Ibid., 28.
1798
Ibid., 39, 47.
1799
Ibid., 5, 91-5.
1800
Ibid., 99.
1801
Ibid., 190.
1802
Ibid., 81.
1803
These, in various combinations, are the preoccupations of Cubists, Constructivists, Suprematists, De Stijl
(Plasticism), and Abstract Expressionists, spanning the full range of their expressions, from floating colour planes of
the early Piet Mondrian, to the colour fields of Barnett Newman, dramatically transected by vertical zips.
1797
306
reveals that the more concretely poiesis is rendered, the more devoid of content it becomes. This is why,
in the case of Fountain, the transformation of the ordinary thing to art can be accomplished by neither any
formal nor by any conceptual property as such. As Duchamp intuits, the selection, reception and
exposition of the readymade rest upon an axiom: either this is an artwork or it is not. Yet, when art is at
its best, this difference is infra-thin, a term which Duchamp employs to describe the minimal gap between
a thing and its self-identity.1804 In deciding this question, “aesthetic judgment is an infra-thin passage and
an indifferent difference, something that does not have a name, and even less a concept,”1805 suggests
Thierry de Duve. The minimal distinction which admits Fountain to the realm of art compels us to strip to
their barest our aesthetic norms, and the categories by which we understand these.
The readymade declines to be named in any simple relation to medium or genre.1806 Although its primary
objective is to provoke aesthetic decision, it is no surprise that the implications of such a decision should
transform how we interpret the value of the art-object, and that its use value gives way to aesthetic
value.1807 The readymade “articulate[s] the tense relation between art and commodity,”1808 and resists
being merely a “displaced commodity.”1809 If ultimately it is treated as a new genre, the readymade
warrants this treatment not by drawing out comparisons to the standards of sculpture or urinals, but by its
very refusal of association. Rejecting relation, Fountain sets its own boundaries, affirming the logic of
containment at its centre. The transfiguration of the object to art presents an internal expansion of the
terms which it contains – a distension in other words.1810 At the same time, the readymade presents the
poietic manifestation of a new medium, and so appeals equally to a transumptive logic. “[F]or Duchamp,
the art work…is neither purely verbal nor purely visual (or musical), nor is it an intermedia composition,”
Perloff maintains. Rather, the transumptive logic emerges in what Duchamp regards in the terms of the
1804
10.
1805
Marjorie Perloff, 21st Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 116; also ibid., 109-
Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans.
Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991), 160.
1806
“The readymade…renders the act of naming…undecidable” (de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 159). Joselit
recognizes this same nominal deficiency in terms of an “alienation between words and objects [which] occurs in
virtually all of Duchamp‟s readymades” ( David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: MIT, 1998), 87).
1807
Foster, Return, 109-10. Foster is more committed than most critics to analysing the manner in which value of
any kind retains an intrinsic economic logic.
1808
Foster, Return, 108.
1809
Joselit, Infinite Regress, 72.
1810
Duchamp himself named this slight distension of reality as that which interested him in the pataphysics of Alfred
Jarry, and which inspired the delay which marks the relation of the readymade to the Real (Perloff, 21st Century
Modernism, 87).
307
infra-thin as a type of nominalism which makes art Real1811 – a minimization of relation and distinction
which “distinguishes the same from the same;”1812 the minutest possible delay1813 between taking-place as
an event and taking-place as an instant.1814
In this light, Fountain suggests the potential universality of the minimalist aesthetic, while also
demonstrating that it is perfectly conceivable for a single object to manifest concurrently more than one of
the three logics of minimalist transumption – containment, distension and distribution – identified in the
present work. Yet, despite its smooth, monochromatic, symmetrical appearance, and although it is formed
by the processes and materials conventionally reserved for industrial manufacture,1815 it would be
incorrect to label Fountain a minimalist sculpture.1816 Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine that the
radical position adopted by the minimalists could have taken hold were it not for Dada‟s proto-minimalist
proclivities. Critics of minimalism uphold this claim. Strickland discerns Duchamp‟s influence on
Rauschenberg‟s combines and Morris‟ Column;1817 and despite the latter having produced the iconic grey
polyhedrons which bring together the monochromatic and geometric traditions of abstract sculpture,
Maurice Berger quite rightly argues that the diversity of Morris‟ work points beyond minimalism to a
neo-Dadaist sensibility.1818
Wollheim, in the essay “Minimal Art,” argues that the stylistic austerity of Reinhardt‟s monochromatic
canvases – “only minimally ahead of the tabula rasa [they] supersede[…]”1819 – and the readymades of
Duchamp – works of which there are “preexistent facsimiles or highly undifferentiated objects” 1820 – are
associated by their displacement of the evidence of physical work1821 to the realm of concept.1822 As we
have seen, in Greenberg‟s terms, minimalism belongs to the Dadaist anti-art tradition, but, devoid of the
presence to which it aspires, is incapable even of generating much interest in this respect.1823 Yet, as Hal
Foster suggests, “if the first great misreading is that minimalism is reductive, the second is that it is
1811
Ibid., 116-7.
de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 160.
1813
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 87-8.
1814
The instant represents the smallest possible existent temporal entity.
1815
Danto – in what, I believe, is an exaggerated claim – sees this as the defining feature of minimalist sculpture
(Danto, Transfiguration, 25, 44, 57).
1816
Strickland emphasizes this point in similar terms (Strickland, Minimalism, 21).
1817
Ibid., 20-1, 24.
1818
Berger, Labyrinths, 6, 22, 34.
1819
Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” 397.
1820
Ibid., 394.
1821
Ibid., 395-6.
1822
Ibid., 399.
1823
Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 183-5.
1812
308
idealist.”1824 Above I contend that the opposition in minimalism between concept and object is one which
is forced by rhetoric rather than anything intrinsic. If we are to understand either Dada or minimalism as
expressing a type of conceptualism, it must be on condition that this is the concept at its most material –
that which clarifies the Real, which renders the Real more-real.
Kenneth Baker reiterates the Dadaist legacy in minimalism in terms of questions of the object, reality, and
presence, and, contra Greenberg, he suggests that it is the material presence (above any concept) sought
by the minimalists which not only distinguishes them from Dadaists, but also renders their work
genuinely novel.1825 Turning minimalism subtly towards its dialectic and mediatory dimension, Barbara
Rose‟s “A B C Art” interprets this art as incorporating elements of Dada and Constructivism.1826 This
view is echoed by Foster,1827 by Meyer1828 – especially in discussing Flavin and Andre1829 – and Perloff
who, explaining theatricality in minimalism, juxtaposes Fried‟s essentially anti-Dadaist stance to the
Constructivist position in which the work “exist[s] only in relation to the environment and the viewer, that
they were affected by conditions external to their own materiality.”1830
We become increasingly aware that Dada operates as a kind of aesthetic stem-cell. It reflects, reflects
upon, or influences a range of aesthetic movements. As we have seen, surrealism develops from the
Dadaist aesthetic, and on the level of form, Dada consolidates the most revolutionary aspects of cubism
and futurism. In many of its best works – particularly its typographical experiments and phonetic poetry –
it addresses aesthetic concerns strikingly similar to those reflected in Constructivism and De Stijl.1831 At
its most abstract, its desire for directness reflects the spirit of abstract expressionism and minimalism, as
we have already witnessed.
These aside, Dada influences or generates the prototype for many of the most radical experiments of the
neo avant-garde artists of the 1950s and 1960s.1832 Shattuck argues that Dada‟s asystematicity and
1824
Foster, Return, 40.
Baker, Minimalism, 20, 24.
1826
Rose, “ABC,” 278.
1827
Foster, Return, 4.
1828
Meyer, Minimalism, 145.
1829
Ibid., 106, 111-2, 190.
1830
Perloff, Moment, 110.
1831
Dachy, Dada Movement, 9. Gregory Battcock, a leading of anthologist of minimalist and conceptual art, devotes
a full study to the close relationship between minimal art and constructivism (Gregory Battcock, Constructivism and
Minimal Art: Some Critical, Theoretical and Aesthetic Correlations. Diss. New York University, 1979).
1832
Foster, Return, 1.
1825
309
heterogeneity epitomize a mode of radical romanticism, 1833 and it is not surprising in this light, that of its
most pervasive concerns – aleatory operations – should take hold so fervently in the neo-romanticism of
postmodern culture.1834 Chance, to which the Dadaists regularly appeal, becomes a central concern in all
expressive media. The Surrealists make a loose but significant appeal to chance as an engine of poiesis,
and more rigorous aleatory operations are evident in the work of the Black Mountain and Fluxus groups –
most iconically in the multifaceted oeuvre of John Cage1835 – as well as in many of the most significant
new media, digital and hypertext experiments, those of Alison Knowles and Stuart Moulthrop amongst
them. Perloff, meanwhile, suggests that the poetry of leading contemporary avant-gardists – amongst
other she names Bök, Goldsmith, McCaffery and Drucker – would be inconceivable without the
revolutionary attitude heralded by Dada.1836 Through the challenge to the distinction of art from life which
the readymade issues, and by extending the logic of collage to three dimensions, Dada anticipates the
“vernacular realism”1837 of an art of assemblage – “a means of creating works of art almost entirely from
pre-existent elements.”1838 Assemblage itself develops in several directions: Robert Rauschenberg‟s
combines integrate painterly technique with “blunt undisguised things;”1839 Alan Kaprow creates entire
environments or installations, often redefined, by the involvement they call for from the viewer, as
happenings;1840 and the wholesale revision of the environment instigated by such daring experiments as
Christo‟s and Jeanne-Claude‟s Wrapped Coast1841 – a 2.4 kilometre stretch of Little Bay, Sidney, which
was wrapped in a giant 92 900m of fabric, held in place for four weeks by rope.1842
Like its forebears, the neo-Dadaists Fluxus group1843 was as heterogeneous as it was active. Anarchic,
occasionally nihilistic, but tirelessly experimental, Fluxus embraces numerous genres and disciplines in
1833
Roger Shattuck, “The Mode of Juxtaposition,” About French Poetry from Dada to ‘Tel Quel’: Text and Theory,
ed. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1974), 20.
1834
Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, 3; Niall Lucy, Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997), ix, 65, 73.
1835
The work of numerous other leading avant-gardists of the time involved various aleatory techniques, including
Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Pierre Boulez, Jackson Mac Low, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the
minimalists Terry Riley and La Monte Young.
1836
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 87.
1837
Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance 1958-1964 (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1984), 19
1838
Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art since 1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 119.
1839
Haskel, Blam!, 17.
1840
The most significant artists of this period to stage happenings include Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms
and Jim Dine.
1841
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Wrapped Coast, 1969.
1842
Michael Lailach, Land Art (Bonn: Taschen, 2007), 32.
1843
Fluxus included such eminent experimentalists as Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Emmett Williams,
Nam Jun Paik, as well as the minimalists La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Robert Morris, several of whom were
students of John Cage.
310
the same moment as it transgresses these. It figures its aesthetic dynamic in terms of events rather than
happenings, opposing its anarchically determined, but carefully prescribed, “unitary gesture[s]”1844 to
more “improvisatory permissiveness of most [h]appenings.”1845 The group stretches what might be
legitimately understood in terms of conceptual and performance art, video and sonic art, and the
experimental extremes of visual and sound poetry. Of its most significant practitioners are also amongst
the best minimalists, including the composers Terry Riley and La Monte Young, visual artist Robert
Morris and interart poet, Emmett Williams. Indeed, the concrete poetry of the latter instantiates amongst
the most rigorous types of minimalism imaginable.
13. SONIC OBJECTS AS MINIMALIST POETRY
a) Solid sounds
The term object poem1846 is offered by critic Harold Rosenberg to describe the poetic logic adopted by
artworks which are constituted by the selection and arrangement of particular prefabricated objects. These
works – which aim “to pin down a state of being in the concreteness of things” 1847 – intuit that the
concrete exemplification of the futurist moment in works such as Duchamp‟s readymades and neoDadaist assemblages is not only material, but belongs equally to concept and language. Exhibiting a
disjunctive parataxis, the object poem demands a “new type of reading,”1848 one which reaches beyond
any particular medium, or combination of media, towards the force of poietic coherence itself through
which the material object – whether its matter is plastic, sonic, conceptual or kinetic – is transumed or
transfigured to an art object.
That the concrete substance of the object proves, in this light, to be as contingent as that which defines the
poem itself again prompts us to move from the visual sphere to that of language and sound in order fully
1844
Haskell, Blam!, 49.
Ibid.
1846
To the object poem we might compare Andre Breton‟s Poem-Object (Andre Breton, “Object-Poem,” trans.
Michael Benedikt, PMV1, 477) which attempts to contain the poem within a unified object. Similar experiments
were undertaken by several concrete poets in later years.
1847
Harold Rosenberg, “Object Poems,” Artworks and Packages (New York: Dell, 1969), 78-9.
1848
Butler, Early Modernism, 170.
1845
311
to comprehend the logic of transumption. Sonic objecthood is of particular interest in this regard,
precisely for the manner in which it manifests with such material force extraneously to many of the
habitual markers of materiality. In this light, Perloff is quite correct in claiming that “the sound of poetry
[is] – in all senses of the word – significant.”1849 Its consonances and dissonances, its rhythms and
repetitions, its tones and intonations, and its rhymes and resonances have always been integral to the
poetic enterprise itself. The historical imbrication of poetry, sound and music is as venerable as it is
complicated. It is closely tied to the means of its transmission, regarding which it is useful to keep in
mind Cole‟s observation that “[i]n all cultures of which we have knowledge...word literacy has preceded
music literacy.” Since “there is no parallel with the slow evolution of word writing,” 1850 a significant rift
exists between modern musical notation – organized around the specification of exact pitch, duration and
metre,1851 and which has remained largely unchanged since late Medieval times – and the communication
of musical information paratextually, through the supplementary graphemes1852 which link sound and
poem.1853 In this sense, there is a tradition of notating sound poetry which stretches back almost two and a
half millennia, and which, we can reasonably assume, reciprocally informs and is informed by a
vernacular oral tradition of performance.
Within the western tradition, classical sources provide many useful descriptions of the manner in which
poetry has always been tied to performance.1854 For confirmation, we need look no further than Plato‟s
address to Ion – “you rhapsodes and actors, you and the poets whose work you sing” 1855 – or Aristotle‟s
description of how “rhythm, melody, and verse…[are sometimes] all used together, and in others
introduced separately one after another.”1856 The most fundamental aspects of poetry emerge through the
union of our intrinsic mimetic capacity, which “delight[s] in works of imitation”1857 and a musical “sense
of harmony and rhythm natural to us.”1858 Many of poetry‟s most conspicuous elements are the sonic
devices through which it mimes the natural world. Against nature, poetry measures itself, determining the
proportions of its rhythmic structures; from nature it derives onomatopoeia; and upon nature it
superimposes patterns of its own invention – principally metre, rhyme and other sonic consonances.
1849
Perloff and Dworkin, Introduction, 11.
Hugo Cole, Sounds and Signs: Aspects of Musical Notation (London: Oxford UP, 1974), 6.
1851
Cole refers to this as a “time-pitch” (ibid., 8).
1852
We might include amongst these various shapes, diacritical marks, neumes and supplementary alphabets, all of
which are added to existing literary texts.
1853
Nancy Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde: A Musicologist‟s Perspective,” SP/PS, 98.
1854
M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 4-6. Hereafter AGM.
1855
Plato, “Ion,” trans. Paul Woodruff, Plato Complete Works, 532d/ 940.
1856
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. John Warrington (London: J. M. Dent, 1963), 4.
1857
Ibid., 8.
1858
Ibid.
1850
312
Poetry, for the Ancient Greeks, is as much an art of recitation and musical performance as it is a rhythmic
construction within language. The early cultic hymns of public ritual1859 were adapted to every social
situation, from political contestations to the drink-fuelled debates of symposia1860 – elaborated in the
parody of iambic verse which gives rise to comedy, and the heroic narrative of epic poetry which sparks
the genesis of tragedy, with which it shares a thematic gravity.1861 Central to the structural integrity of
tragedy is the chorus, the group of singers which offer both exposition of, and commentary on, dramatic
action.1862 The chorus recalls the “ritual poetic forms”1863 of tragedy‟s theurgical roots, singing or
chanting in various metres, completing or complementing the dialogue between characters. The
interventions of the chorus exemplify the manner in which Ancient Greek music – “the art of the
Muses”1864 – emphasizes the “unity of poetry, melody, and gesture in archaic and classical culture.” 1865
“Besides singing,” West identifies the prevalence of “a technique of reciting verse with instrumental
accompaniment”1866 akin to chanting. A distinctly minimalist aesthetic adheres to the performance of this
poetry: “clarity and purity of tone, resonance, and coincidence with the accompaniment were the virtues
commended.”1867 In this art, simplicity and linearity are valued not as an end in themselves, but because
they clarify the work, allowing poetry, music and performance to reflect and intensify one another,
“characterizing the text in relation to its poetic genre.”1868
It is fortunate that although only a few fragments of notated music survive from classical antiquity, 1869 the
means of their accurate deciphering is contained in the numerous theoretical treatises produced by the
Greeks and Romans in their attempts to work out the systematic elements of the acoustic universe.1870
1859
Giovanni Comotti, Music in Greek and Roman Culture, trans. Rosaria V. Munson (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1989), 16; AGM, 14-5; Aristotle, Poetics, 4. The most significant of these hymns are the paean and
dithyramb – the former dedicated to Apollo, the latter to Dionysus – the same opposition from which arises the
“Dionysian madness...from which both the tragic and comic arts emerged” and along which Nietzsche traces his
discussion in the Birth of Tragedy (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald
Spears (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 7).
1860
Comotti, Music, 6; AGM, 24-6.
1861
Aristotle, Poetics, 9-11; 42-5.
1862
AGM, 40-1. Claude Calame, “The Tragic Choral Group: Dramatic Roles and Social Function,” trans. Dan
Edelstein. A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 216.
1863
Ibid., 217-8.
1864
Comotti, Music, 3.
1865
Ibid.
1866
AGM, 40.
1867
Ibid., 45. Comotti makes a similar point (Comotti, Music, 12).
1868
Ibid.
1869
Ibid., 2-3; AGM, 7.
1870
Ibid., 4-6; Cole, Sounds and Signs, 7-8; Comotti, Music, 2-3, 99.
313
These fragments – mostly didactic excerpts or choral prompts1871 – were notated using letters adapted
from the alphabet and inscribed above the poetic text.1872 Rhythm, metre, duration and tempo were
relative to the syllabic stresses of the poem.1873 As music was largely transmitted by repetition and
memorization,1874 and because an improvisatory spirit permeated almost every genre of Greek poetry,
“words, rhythm, and music...were each time adjusted to the requirements of the moment.”1875 Two
Delphic hymns to Apollo (Track 26)1876 – the first composed anonymously in 138 B.C., the second by
Limenios in 128 B.C. – remain the most complete records of Greek music, exemplifying well the manner
in which instrumental accompaniment amplifies the clarity of the chanting chorus, and the alternation
between recitation and melody. From Imperial Rome, only a single haunting fragment survives – “four
mutilated measures,”1877 by the celebrated Roman poet, Terence (Track 27).1878
The comparative study of chant – across various religious traditions, cultures and historical periods –
reveals four essential categories of incantation: recitative chant, in which a single reciting tone is used for
an entire text with occasional variations at the ends of phrases; syllabic chant, in which each syllable is
assigned a single tone, which tones are then sequenced to constitute a melody; neumatic chant, in which
short embellishments of a few notes often occur on single syllables; and melismatic chant, in which
numerous tones can be assigned to individual syllables, and thus exhibit complex types of ornamentation.
Neumatic and melismatic cantation, generally melodically intricate, are more closely associated with our
understanding of music than of poetry. For this reason it is necessary to leave aside the more ornate
traditions of Gregorian and Byzantine chant, noting rapidly that it is no exaggeration to claim that Greek
poetic recitation presents the single most universal influence on western literature and music, and the
many subsequent attempts to coordinate poiesis and sound at their most fundamental levels. There is
almost certainly some continuity between the chant forms of the medieval church, east and west, and the
music of Imperial Rome.1879 Before the Carolingian imposition of the Gregorian liturgy and its chant
across Europe in the thirteenth century, a variety of regional forms thrived, many of which clearly
1871
Ibid., 12; AGM, 7; Cole, Sounds and Signs, 7.
Comotti, Music, 99-100.
1873
Ibid., 102-3.
1874
Cole, Sounds and Signs, 8.
1875
Ibid., 7.
1876
Anonymous, “First Delphic Hymn to Apollo,” Musique de la Grèce Antique. Harmonia Mundi, 1979.
1877
Gregorio Paniagua, liner notes, Musique de la Grèce Antique, Harmonia Mundi, 1979, 8.
1878
Terence, “Hecyra,” Musique de la Grèce Antique.
1879
Imperial Rome absorbed many of the artistic norms of the Greeks, and although early Christians were resistant to
Roman cultural ideals, the Jewish liturgical tradition and the classical influence soon came together, as evidenced in
the treatise of the fifth century musical theorist, Boethius (Albert Seay, Music in the Medieval World (Prospect
Heights: Waveland, 1975), 16-17, 19.
1872
314
manifest their ancient ancestry. The Old Roman chant of the pontifical liturgy of seventh century Rome
presents a “meeting point between the music of Greco-Latin antiquity and the Middle Ages”1880 (Track
28).1881 Older still is the Mozarabic chant of Latin Hispania (Track 29),1882 consolidated in the fifth
century by the Visigoths,1883 the Benevantan and Milanese chant of Lombard south Italy, which is “pure,
archaic, and elaborate...full of formulaic repetitions,”1884 and the Gallican chant which is now entirely
extinct.
By contrast, much syllabic and recitative chant expresses a palpably poetic sensibility. To the first
Delphic hymn we might fruitfully compare Muhammad Hassan‟s masterful recitation of Surat AlFatihah, the first part of the Qur’an (Track 30)1885 and Tibetan Buddhist chant from the Thami monastery
(Track 31).1886 In the case of the former, the means are minimal, yet the effect is as considerable as it is
poetic. The melody alternates between two principal reciting tones with occasional and subtle micro-tonal
embellishments which elicit the remarkable syncopation innate to the language, and generate the slight
imbalance which renders the stable tone and rhyme at the end of each phrase so effective. In the latter, the
rapid, even-paced reciting-tone of the mantra – over which the more expressively inflected tone of a leadchanter drifts, and which is intensified at various points by the startling unison of the trisyllabic phrase om
ma hum1887 – demonstrates well the potential proximity of speech, chant and verse.
Two of the most perceptive thinkers on the relation of sound and poetry – Jacques Roubaud (a founder of
Oulipo) and Dick Higgins (a pioneer and tireless, if controversial, advocate of intermedia concretism) –
agree that sonic poetry is necessarily separate from music and song. According to Higgins, “[o]ne thing
that sound poetry is not is music,”1888 while Roubauld is unambiguous in asserting that “[a] song is not a
poem and a poem is not a song.”1889 Both affirm the normative potential of genre, or the purpose of
1880
Marcel Pérès, liner notes, trans. James O. Wootton, Saint Marcel Mass, Old Roman Chant, Harmonia Mundi,
1992, 9.
1881
Ensemble Organum, “Domine quinque taelta,” Saint Marcel Mass, Old Roman Chant. Harmonia Mundi, 1992.
1882
Ensemble Organum, “Qui venit ad me non esuriet,” Mozarabic Chant, Cathedral of Toledo. Harmonia Mundi,
1995.
1883
Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta, liner notes, Mozarabic Chant, Cathedral of Toledo, Harmonia Mundi, 1995, 9,
12.
1884
Thomas Forrest Kelly, liner notes, Chant of the Cathedral of Benevento: Holy Week and Easter, Harmonia
Mundi, 1993, 8.
1885
Muhammad Hassan, “Surat Al-Fatihah,” Holy Qur’an .
1886
Monks of Thami Monastery, “Phyag‟chal-ba,” Tibet: Musiques Sacrées, Ocora, 1987.
1887
Georges Luneau, liner notes, trans. J. Bennett, Tibet: Musiques Sacrées, 8.
1888
Dick Higgins, “Points Towards a Taxonomy of Sound Poetry,” Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984), 51.
1889
Jacques Roubaud, “Prelude: Poetry and Orality,” trans. Jean-Jacques Poucel, SP/PS, 18.
315
establishing the conditions upon which their respective taxonomies are maximally coherent.1890 In a
significant sense, they are, of course, correct: sound poetry is not music, just as a shrub is not a tree. Yet,
we must also consider that sound poetry makes little sense qua poetry if we fail to hear the resonance of
the aesthetic which Hellenic culture recognized in terms of music – the integration of poetry, song and
gesture. This musical aesthetic of ancient drama informs not only the liturgical interplay of medieval
chant1891 and mystery and morality plays,1892 but also influences the trobar – the art of the troubadours
(and later, the trouveres): those travelling musician-poets whose song, centred on pastoral motifs and
romantic love, “indissolubly interlaces a particular language to its music”1893 (Track 32).1894
From the innovations of the troubadours, poetry consolidates its most stable melodic property. “Rhyme as
we know it came to the fore...by means of the troubadour verse and the evolution of an emphasis on
sound.”1895 Yet, just as song and poetry seem most intimate, they part company: poetry asserts its
autonomy from music, and “in relation to other types of language arts.”1896 Although historians of poetry
seldom make the observation, this rift most likely has less to do with any generic innovation, and more to
do with the rapid rise of polyphony – the increasingly complex interaction of melodies becomes an end in
itself and, for the most part, does not deal sympathetically with the semantic or formal properties of the
verse. For poetry, the result is the development of lyrical forms such as the sonnet independently of the
direct influence of music. Certainly, verse is still set to music – we need only think of the remarkable
corpus of John Dowland in this regard – but even in such cases, lyrical poetry retains an independence it
did not previously possess. In this light it is perhaps not surprising that between the fourteenth century
and the end of the nineteenth century the relation between poetry and sound is governed by the lyrical
genres. In fact, poetry becomes virtually synonymous with lyricism, even though, as we have seen, there
is considerably greater sonic interest in the history of poetry than the history of the lyric is able to
express.1897
1890
Higgins proposes eight classes of sound poetry: “ folk varieties,...onomatopoeic or mimetic pieces,...nonsense
poetries which trope their own languages” (Higgins, Points, 50) and the more contemporary expressions of “works
in an invented language,...near-nonsense works,...phatic poems [in which semantic meanings of sonic units are
defamiliarized by various techniques of statement (ibid., 45-6)],...unwritten-out poems,...notated ones” (ibid., 50).
1891
This dramatic element emerges in the responsorial performance of many chants as well as dramatic forms such
as the Passion. Some critics, incorrectly I believe, downplay the dramatic element of liturgy. See, for example,
Deirdre O‟Grady, The Last Troubadours: Poetic drama in Italian opera 1597-1887 (London and New York:
Routledge, 1991), 5.
1892
Robert Donington, The Rise of Opera (London and Boston: Faber, 1981) 19.
1893
Ibid.
1894
Taimbault de Vaqueiras, “Kalenda Maya,” The Dante Troubadours. Nimbus, 1997.
1895
Susan Stewart, “Rhyme and Freedom,” SP/PS, 36.
1896
Roubaud, Prelude, 19.
1897
Perloff and Dworkin, Introduction, 2-7.
316
b) Intermediation as generic expression
Intermediation, understood as “a conceptual fusion of scenario, visuality...audio elements”1898 and
language,1899 has, in Higgins‟ estimation, “always been a possibility since the most ancient times.”1900 In
this light, we should not overlook the particularly remarkable revival of the ideals of Greek tragedy in
sixteenth century Florence. Two aristocratic groups – the predominantly intellectual Camerata dei Bardi,
and the performers of the Accademia degli Alterati1901 – debated the classical notion of music,
concluding, despite their differences, that only in returning to ancient models could a new mode of
expression be found in which “music shares integrally with the words in unfolding the drama”1902 to be
portrayed. Opera – as this radical, transgeneric, intermedia project came to be known 1903 – aimed at
nothing less than the resurrection and contemporary perfection of the aesthetic philosophy they believed
the Greeks had practised, but which had been lost to the West. Despite its occasional stylistic flourishes,
the aesthetic ambition of early opera is essentially minimalist in much the same sense as its Greek
precursor: both strive for rhythmic clarity, formal transparency, and an immediacy in the relation between
poetic text and its sonic properties. “Without neglecting to be song, music must contrive to be
declamation...known in general as the reciting style...expressing as faithfully and as vividly as possible a
more or less dramatic verbal style.”1904 A mature example of this style can be heard in the opening
recitative of Claudio Monteverdi‟s Orfeo in which the rhythms of speech are clearly discernible in the
narrative declamation of the shepherds (Track 33).1905 Although opera rapidly becomes extremely
elaborate, abandoning the classical model, it retains a certain concern with aesthetic unity and immediacy,
as is clearly evidenced in the Wagnerian use of Sprechgesang1906 and the search for a Gesamtkunswerk,
“uniting every branch of art,” recognizing that “[t]he endeavour of Art is therefore all-embracing.”1907
1898
Higgins, Points, 27.
Ibid., 24-5.
1900
Ibid., 25.
1901
The genesis of opera is often erroneously credited to the Camerata alone (which was hosted by Giovanni Bardi,
and included the theoretician Vincenzo Gallilei, the father of Gallileo and the composer Giulio Caccini). In fact
there existed a productive rivalry of sorts between this group and the Accademia degli Alterati, sponsored by Jacopo
Corsi, and which included the most significant early librettists, Allesandro and Ottavio Rinuccini and the composer
Jacopo Peri (O‟Grady, Last of the Troubadours, 4-5).
1902
Donington, Rise of Opera, 19.
1903
See Higgins, Points, 25.
1904
Donington, Rise of Opera, 68.
1905
Claudio Monteverdi, “In question lieto,” Orfeo. Erato, 1986.
1906
Sprechgesang (and the later Sprechstimme) is a style between speech and song, similar to the recitative of earlier
opera, although stylistically more punctuated in narrative than the verse of early opera and classical tragedy.
1907
Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, trans. William Ashton Ellis.
http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm. 20 November 2011.
1899
317
It is at first surprising that the minimalists should discover in opera arguably their most successful
vehicle. Yet, recalling its austere Greek origins, the late Renaissance emphasis on directness of
expression, and the Wagnerian revival of the notion of absolute art in the Gesamtkunswerk, we encounter
a genre which, for all its opulence, is predominantly concerned with generating a forceful access to the
Real. This capacity is revealed in Philip Glass‟ first operatic trilogy, all three works of which extensively
explore the reflexive relationship between music and language. The examination offered by Glass and his
librettists is particularly interesting, as throughout the cycle they employ languages not in common usage:
Einstein on the Beach incorporates the abstract language of mathematics, closely reflected in the additive
and subtractive processes of the compositional process, with the non-linear poetry of Christopher
Knowles, whose “neurological impairment and a strikingly unusual way of viewing his own world” 1908
helped him to write texts of “startling originality;”1909 Satyagraha, a political work based on Mahatma
Ghandi‟s early political life and his philosophy of passive resistance, is written in Sanskrit;1910 and
Akhnaten, a potent exploration of the parallel logic of religion and politics in the foundational gesture of
monotheism,1911 is largely compiled from various fragments in the language of ancient Egypt. 1912 On the
other hand, Alice Goodman‟s libretto for John Adams‟ first opera, Nixon in China – which deals with the
historic 1972 meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong – is written entirely in rhyming
couplets.1913 Consider the following chorus close to the opera‟s opening (Track 34):1914
The people are the heroes now
Behemoth pulls the peasant‟s plow
When we look up, the fields are white
With harvest in the morning light
And mountain ranges one by one
Rise red beneath the harvest moon. 1915
Not only does the verse follow a traditional lyrical mould, but, as in the classical tradition, speech is
imitated closely in the refrain – “The people are the heroes now/ Behemoth pulls the peasant plough” – in
terms of both the limited melodic range and the rhythmic material used by Adams. The heroic pastoral
1908
Philip Glass, Opera on the Beach: Philip Glass on his New World of Music Theatre (London and Boston: Faber,
1988) 28.
1909
Ibid.
1910
Schwartz Minimalists, 142.
1911
Ibid., 147.
1912
Ibid., 148.
1913
Alice Goodman, “Towards Nixon in China, ” booklet. Nixon in China, Nonesuch, 1988, 11 (11-3).
1914
John Adams, “The people are the heroes now,” Nixon in China, Nonesuch, 1988.
1915
Alice Goodman, “The people are the heroes now,” libretto, Nixon in China, music by John Adams, Orch. St.
Lukes, cond. Edo de Waart, Nonesuch, 1988, 30.
318
imagery which begins “When we look up” is conveyed by distended rhythmic figures, of triplets against
the quadruple metre, maintained in the steady flow of eighth notes passed between woodwind, brass
synthesizer (harpsichord) and in the pizzicato quarter notes in the lower strings. The white “morning
light,” in which the harvest – a powerful symbol of the prosperity of the people –is revealed, passes
without interruption into the rising harvest moon, its red light reflected in the “mountain ranges” it
progressively renders visible. The image here is one of the rise of communism in China. Labour, like the
rhythmic accompaniment of the orchestra, is ceaseless and unlimited by the time of day. If the harvest
begins at daybreak, it continues into moonlit night. We are enjoined to juxtapose the rapid flow of
chronological time – the working-day – with the cyclical temporality of day and night, lunar cycles, and
the seasons. We might understand the tension between temporal passage and cyclical repetition – and
between the speech-like declamation of the opening two lines and the heroic lyricism of those which
follow – in terms of a continuum of revolutionary time. This is of particular significance in light of the
Maoist emphasis on the necessity of an “ongoing, permanent revolution,”1916 and its transposition from
urban to rural societies, from factory to field. As is an habitual consequence of syncopation, the subtle
displacement of the word “plow” at various points, strengthens moments of regularity and cadential
arrival. Rhyme, for its part, reinforces the sense of consonance and containment which complements the
immediacy so central to minimalism. Similar observations might be noted of the interaction of verse and
music, word and voice, in the varied and sophisticated song-writing of Nico Muhly, the most interesting
composer to adapt the sonic vocabulary of musical minimalism in recent years, and of the remarkable
minimalism of Louis Andriessen, in which the object is made virtually tangible by musical means. In this
respect, the opening of the four-part musical theatre work, De Materie, is exemplary: the orchestra
literally hammers out in sound the bruteness of matter, one hundred and forty four “instrumental
fortissimo crashes (toccata!)”1917 which introduce the theory of the visionary Dutch philosopher, Gorlaeus
(1591-1612), arguably the world‟s first atomic physicist who reinvigorates the classical atomism of
ancient Greece1918 (Track 35).1919
At its best, minimalist opera – incorporating under the banner of music any art which intensifies the force
with which it communicates, while retaining a radical, immediate and essentially materialist
understanding of each of these – explores the objectal logic we might identify in terms of a sonic object
poem. It presents a strong case for the survival into contemporary aesthetics of the ancient notion of
1916
Hallward, Badiou, 226.
Elmer Schönberger, liner notes, De Materie, Nonesuch, 1996, 8.
1918
Ibid., 9.
1919
Louis Andriessen, “Part I,” De Materie. Nonesuch, 1996.
1917
319
music in which poetry and sound are inextricable. On this basis, sound poetry is more than “poetry in
which the sound is the focus,”1920in Higgins‟ terms. It includes, in McCaffery‟s estimation, “the many
instances of chant structures and incantation, of nonsense syllabic mouthings and deliberate lexical
distortions still alive among North American, African, Asian and Oceanic peoples...[the] ludic strata...in
the nonsense syllabery of nursery rhymes, mnemonic counting aids, whisper games and skipping chants,
mouth music and folk-song refrain.”1921
c) Homonymy, homophony and solidity
McCaffery isolates three phases in the development of sound poetry. The earliest is identified in terms of
the “vast, intractable area of archaic and primitive poetries,”1922 which, I believe, discovers its most
significant instantiation in the classical model and its various elaborations. More recent are the avantgardist efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the “several diverse and revolutionary
investigations into language's non-semantic, acoustic properties”1923 which include the Futurists, Dadaists
and a few scattered experimentalists – Christian Morgenstern, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear amongst
them.1924 Most recently, in the 1950s and beyond, sound becomes a central pursuit in the search for a
concrete poetic aesthetic. This poetry extends beyond the limitations of the score, word or phoneme,
beyond the body and the voice, to an understanding of the sonic poetic object as the pure force of
mediation itself. This is intimately bound to development of sound recording technologies which express
the “possibility of „overtaking‟ speech by the machine.”1925
It is the second of these phases which is approximated by the futurist moment – that point of revolutionary
utopianism identified earlier. Striking works of experimental sound poetry are produced by both the
Russian and Italian Futurists, and key Dadaists from the Zurich and Berlin avant-garde scenes.
Attempting to press to a linguistic point of origin for the rich rhymes, rhythms, alliterative and
onomatopoeic potential of the Russian language, poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexey Kruchenykh,
Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd) and Vladimir Majakovskij are instrumental in uncovering a poetry which is
1920
Higgins, Taxonomy.
Steve McCaffery, Sound Poetry – A Survey, http://www.ubu.com/papers/mccaffery.html. 20 November 2011.
1922
Ibid.
1923
Ibid.
1924
Ibid.; Higgins, Taxonomy.
1925
McCaffery, Sound Poetry.
1921
320
“spontaneous [and] instantaneous.”1926 Sound, in their estimation, is the element most capable of
achieving the sense of simultaneism and movement common to every brand of futurism.1927 In poems
such as “Ballad of the Dancer” (Track 36),1928 Kruchenykh presses the rhythmic onomatopoeic element of
poetic language in novel directions, beyond the mimicry of concrete sounds, towards something wholly
more abstract. Here the accents and stresses of dance are clearly audible: it opens with a vigorously
accented alternation of rapid, multi-syllabic upbeats and regular, heavy downbeats (0”-10”), which
proceeds through growingly even syllables and a subtle ritardando (0”-15”) through a bridge (16”-33”)
with its several dramatic fermata or pauses and melodically perceptible imperfect cadence,1929 and into a
second motif which begins irregularly, but culminates in a waltz or minuet, with its characteristic staccato
third beat which leads into an accented first beat (42”–52”), concluding with an onomatopoeic click of the
heel to end the dance and poem.
More notable in relation to minimalism, is Kruchenykh‟s phonemic work – brief, repetitive and entirely
onomatopoeic1930 – in which “poetry must revert to a more primitive, more libidinal, outburst of organic
orality.”1931 Consider “zok zok zok” (Track 37),1932 which explores a range of phonemes, points of
articulation, patterns, permutations and reversals. If it is clear that this exposition of the fundamental units
from which language is constituted is a distinctly minimalist activity, it is also the case that Kruchenykh‟s
belief that his poetry was generating an alogical, transrational explodity1933of significance might be
viewed as easily as the foundational gesture of an aesthetic maximalism. To the contemporary ear, the
rhetorical theatricality of Kruchenykh‟s recitation is more outlandish than it is interesting. Yet, we cannot
fail to discern in its feverish urgency, an intense commitment to futurity, one which is intensified in the
eclectic and conceptual approach to poetic sound adopted by his poetic colleague, Khlebnikov.
The radical understanding of poiesis which Khlebnikov endorses rests on the symbolic union of number
and etymology. A mathematician by training, the poet became increasingly concerned with discovering
and figuring, a numerical basis, for reality.1934 The implausibility of Khlebnikov‟s mathematical efforts
1926
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 131.
Butler, Early Modernism, 146.
1928
Alexey Kruchenykh, Ballad of the Dancer, 1951.
1929
This imperfect cadence presents an F# major chord – the sub-dominant chord in C# major – into the dominant
chord, G# major (it could also be written as C#: IV-V).
1930
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 124-5.
1931
Christian Bök, “When Cyborgs Versify,” SP/P S, 130 (129-41).
1932
Alexey Kruchenykh, zok zok zok. Sound source undated.
1933
Nancy Perloff, Sound Poetry, 101-2, 104-5.
1934
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 143-4.
1927
321
are less significant than their affirmation of a super-sensible radix at the heart of language and poetry.
Poetic language is henceforth a zaum language, captured in “phonemic and morphemic play...beyond (za)
mind or reason (um). Zaum is most persuasively translated by the neologism beyonsense. Indeed,
neologism is at the heart of this vision of poiesis, once again charging a poetic language exhausted by
familiarity and which ignores is own strangeness.”1935 The task of the poet is to uncover the etymological
radices of words from within the complex lattice of phonic similarities, and to generate a genuinely novel
poetic vocabulary, extracted from either history or utility,1936 to constitute a translogical poetics.1937 Sound
is of particular importance to Khlebnikov, and in a striking anticipation of the concrete and minimalist
problematization of external reference, “the material form of the signifier is thus [regarded as] its
meaning,”1938 so confirming a distinctive vision of sonic objecthood.
The most celebrated product of Khlebnikov‟s “elaborate etymology” 1939 is the sound-poem “Incantation
by Laughter” (Track 38),1940 which builds an elaborate set of permutations from the root, sme, of the word
laugh, or smekh. Gary Kern provides the following translation:
O laugh it out, you laughsters!
O laugh it up, you laughters!
So they laugh with laughsters, so they laugherize delaughly.
O laugh it up belaughably!
O the laughingstock of the laughed upon – the laugh of the Belaughed laughsters!
O laugh it out roundlaughingly, the laugh of laughed-at Laughians!
Laugherino, laugherino,
Laughify, laughifcate, laugholets, laugholets,
Laughikins, laughkins.
O laugh it out, you laughsters!
O laugh it out, you laughsters!1941
The poem, Perloff explains, “uses suffixes, for example, to turn the stem into plural nouns…verbs…or
adjectives and adverbs. And stems are often joined to suffixes that don‟t go with them.” 1942 In other
words, having grasped the fundamental lexemes, graphemes and phonemes of poetic language, it becomes
possible to assert the universal poetic applicability of any number of etymologically derived and
1935
Ibid., 126.
Ibid., 124.
1937
Ibid., 132.
1938
Ibid., 134.
1939
Ibid., 125.
1940
Velimir Khlebnikov, Incantation by Laughter, 1908-9.
1941
Velimir Khlebnikov, “Incantation by Laughter,” trans. Gary Kern in Nancy Perloff, Sound Poetry, 101.
1942
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 141.
1936
322
phonically coded neologisms. In these, “every letter is letter perfect”1943 precisely because such poetry
enables us to move from the letter as such to the self-sufficiency of the word as such1944 – to a patterning
of reality which begins with the distension of the smallest poetic particles, the minimal difference
between the sounding of these particles and their identity,1945 and in expanding, empties the referential
reserve of the sign so that we are left with a sonic object without content; the uncanny echo of a hollow
laughter.
For Khlebnikov, poetic sound constitutes a metaphysical field in which phoneme and poiesis come
together in an extension of any ordinary reference or historical account. In this respect, he resembles the
theorists of classical Greece who pursued a transcendental principle through which sound, matter and
mind were potentially woven together. Arguably, the principal elements of sonic poetry are as intrinsic to
existence as they are to music or poetry: duration is fundamental to every sonic object, encompassing its
beginning and ending, and constituting the necessary condition for rhythm and metre to take place;
frequency determines the very material composition of objects, which, in sonic objects, includes pitch,
intonation and rhyme. That the sonic instantiation of poiesis is of considerable ontological significance is
affirmed by both Attridge and Stewart. In particular, it is rhythm which instantiates duration as a “realtime event,”1946 providing poetry with its momentum.1947 In Attridge‟s estimation, “[r]hythm is one of the
most familiar experiences of our daily lives. We are all constantly making and encountering rhythms.” 1948
Similarly, in her defence of the centrality of poetic rhythm and rhyme, Stewart remarks that “our speech
rhythms are only a small instance of rhythm as a force in nature, indeed a force in the cosmos.”1949 She
proceeds with a radical claim – that “[r]hythm indeed may be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of
human life, for the embryonic heart begins to beat at eighteen to twenty-one days after conception; at that
point there is no blood to pump, no function for the heart to serve, but if the beat stops, the embryo
dies.”1950
In the sense that rhythm is both observable in the material world, and an intimate part of poietic
generation, it is simultaneously natural and super-natural. The latter is the case if, as does Aristotle, we
1943
Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexey Kruchenykh, “The Letter as Such,” Manifesto, 237.
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 127.
1945
Perloff takes specific note of the similarities between Duchamp‟s infrathin and Khlebnikov‟s understanding of
sound which points to the “self-identity and hence difference of each individual phoneme.”(ibid., 126.).
1946
Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 2.
1947
Ibid., 1.
1948
Ibid., 3-4.
1949
Stewart, “Rhyme and Freedom,” 31.
1950
Ibid., 31-2.
1944
323
believe that certain art is capable of perfecting form1951 by penetrating to the heart of the principles of
nature, not merely reproducing them. Above I suggest that it is possible to analyze Kruchenykh‟s
“Ballad” by discerning a pulse and contingent points of metrical stability, much as one would for a
musical composition. Carper and Attridge identify within the basic components of musical metrics – the
alternation of beat and off-beat – the key to understanding poetic rhythm.1952 In “zok zok zok,” although
the basic material is phonemic, the momentum of the poetic medium emerges as a result of repetition and
variation, which, as Attridge argues, are fundamentally rhythmical: “rhythm is what makes a physical
medium…seem to move with deliberateness though time, recalling what has happened (by repetition) and
projecting itself into the future (by setting up expectations), rather than just letting time pass it by.”1953 If,
for Khlebnikov, poiesis is located primarily in the singular sonic structure of the phoneme, the
“possibilities of chant and charm, zaum and word-magic”1954 rest on a morphology which is intrinsically
rhythmic – it requires the repetition and relation of certain elements.
The knowability of these qualities of poetic sound is supported by their potential quantification – their
being rendered regular by metric divisions and patterns of rhyme. Metre asserts a principle of definite
quantification within a poetic situation which is rhythmic: it includes discrete elements taking-place in a
temporal relation to one another, even when these elements exhibit little or no awareness of their own
quantitative dimension. Metric “units are countable, and the number is significant,” notes Attridge,
“[transforming] the general tendency toward regularity in rhythm into a strictly-patterned regularity that
can be counted and named.”1955 Rhyme, for its part, presents the minimal condition of poetic consonance.
Such consonance is potentially both quantitative and qualitative, and transects equally the fields of sound,
vision, shape and concept. Even as it affirms the taking-place of a poetic entity, it also allows us, perhaps
asks us, to anticipate the future shape of the poem or aesthetic work.1956 In this sense, rhyme and metre
confirm that differentiation and organization are intimately connected to the guarantee of futurity in the
poietic imagination.
Stewart emphasizes with admirable clarity the comparability of rhyme and metre, and the manner in
which they supervene upon rhythm:
1951
Stewart, “Rhyme and Freedom,” 40-1.
Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge, Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (New York and
London: Routledge, 2003), xi. These authors emphasize this rhythmic pattern specifically in relation to poetry in
English.
1953
Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 4.
1954
Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, 153.
1955
Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 7.
1956
Ibid., 4; Stewart, “Rhyme and Freedom,” 43.
1952
324
Rhyme offers a particular kind of pattern, one that is only partly determinative. Unlike rhythm, which may
exist as pure haptic or tactile feeling, rhyme comes with acoustical, if not always semantic, content; and
unlike meter, which remains ideal, rhyme is always realized or manifested. There is a certain balance
between the will and contingency which is effected in rhyming. 1957
This captures very precisely the spirit of the best sound poetry. Rhyme is no longer solely a question of
homophony, but is also a measure of existential consonance. These are high stakes indeed, and lie close to
those which Giorgio Agamben exposes, in his analysis of Aristotle, in terms of the tension between
object, idea1958 and concept. He suggests that objects are synonymous in relation to the concept through
which their identity is amplified, which grants them “the same name and the same definition.”1959 “These
same phenomena, however, that relate to each other as synonyms become homonyms if considered with
respect to the idea.”1960 Homonyms have “the same names but different definitions.”1961
To clarify Agamben‟s manner of distinguishing concept from idea it is necessary to recognize that here he
follows Aristotle‟s commentary, in Book Alpha of his Metaphysics, on the Platonic association of idea
(Form) and number.1962 Phrased reductively, a concept supports the existential definition of phenomenon
in its relation to other phenomena, while an idea refers to the ontological essence of the phenomenon. 1963
The name is invented to approximate the idea – to testify to the potentiality of an immanent
transcendence/transcendental immanence, for what else would be the case were the name and idea to
coincide? – while the concept allows specific properties to be defined or elaborated in relation to an
entity. In trying to grasp the relation between idea, concept and object, a referential impasse emerges: “an
insufficient conception of self-reference blocks us from grasping the crux of the problem.”1964The idea, to
which we must apparently ascribe the ground for consistency itself, is knowable only self-reflexively, and
so is tied to the object on the basis of assertion alone. Meanwhile, the concept, which supposedly
coordinates the properties of the object, has no absolute basis, so that “if we try to grasp a concept as
1957
Ibid., 41.
In relation to Plato, Agamben and his translators prefer idea to Form.
1959
CC, 75.
1960
Ibid.
1961
Ibid. See Christopher Shields, Aristotle (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 147.
1962
To summarize the argument: universal law is derived from the belief that Forms can be explained by number –
the participation or non-participation in the One, to recall Plato‟s Parmenides – and, because number is finally
material, can thus equally apply to sensible as well as to abstract entities (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 24).
1963
CC, 75.
1964
Ibid., 73.
1958
325
such, it is fatally transformed into an object, and the price we pay is no longer being able to distinguish it
from the conceived thing.”1965
We are compelled once again to consider the connection between being and belonging which constitutes a
central concern of identity. An idea expresses the set or class to which an object belongs, but cannot itself
situate the object within this set – the object always expresses itself with respect to an idea. A concept, on
the other hand, encompasses the properties and relations by which an object expresses itself in terms of
identity, proper to a particular set or class. Yet, the concept is incapable of including itself within this
dynamic situation without being collapsed into it. This singular property of the concept – singular in the
strict sense that it is “presented but not represented”1966 – Badiou identifies in terms of its being the
founding element of a set, which means it cannot be included in the very situation it prescribes and to
which it most properly belongs. These “non-predicative expressions”1967 present a site of struggle between
the phenomenal being of an object and its “being-in-language”1968 – its possession of a name; the manner
in which, through a simultaneously self-reflexive and significatory force, the name becomes appended to
an object.
The question I wish to pose in this regard follows: what might transpire if we transpose Agamben‟s claim
that the homonym advances a field of coherence between distinctly defined entities, to the realm of
aesthetic perception; might it be plausible to suggest that the homophone prompts a recognition of
existential consonance between entities similar to that which is claimed for the homonym? As is often the
case, the precision of Agamben‟s ontological thought rests on the degree to which, at singular existential
points, seeming and Being are indiscernible.1969 By extension, might it be possible tentatively to propose
that, under the peculiar poetic condition here broadly termed concrete, the homophone suggests the
manner in which sonic seeming effects sonic Being – the manner in which the force by which two or more
sounds that resemble one another is sufficient to render their relation to one another of equal existential
solidity to the sounds themselves. In this light, the challenge which the homonym and homophone – the
bases of rhyme – present to thought is one of recognizing the consonance between the forces of selfreflexive identification and signification, and the force of generation or poiesis. Discovering such
consonance – the coincidence of seeming and Being – would bring together the transcendental and
1965
Ibid., 73-4.
BE, 99.
1967
CC, 73. Bertrand Russell coins this term to describe the foundational elements of a set.
1968
Ibid.
1969
Agamben, Signature, 23, 32.
1966
326
immanent, and it is perhaps this exceptional sort of sonic objecthood towards which Khlebnikov reaches
in trying to discover the radix of sound at the heart of a word‟s sense.
This example is followed by the Italian futurists,1970 of whom Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh are frankly
dismissive: “[t]he Italians caught a whiff of these Russian ideas and began to copy from us like
schoolboys, making imitation art.”1971 It is certain, however, that Marinetti must be credited with the first
sustained poetic engagement with technology. Central to the narrative of “The Founding and Manifesto of
Futurism,” is the quasi-mythological unification of human and machine: racing into the future, Marinetti
rolls his car into a muddy ditch, and from this symbolic sacrifice, the heroic couple are ritualistically
reborn from the “good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial
soot.”1972 The sonic aspects of Marinetti‟s poetry principally concern this elevation of technology, as is
clearly manifested in the easily recognizable onomatopoeia of “Aprés La Marne.” Here is “phonic poetry,
whose onomatopoeia gives voice not to the ecstatic impulses of an organic anatomy but to the electric
impulses of an operant machine.”1973
Equally interesting, although aside from the question of technology, is “A Landscape Heard,” which
recognizes the poem as a concrete medium for the association of sound and duration – an accumulation of
moments which are a materialization of the quantitative logic of being, if not of quantity itself:
The whistle of a blackbird, envious of the crackling of a fire, ends by extinguishing the gossip of water.
10 seconds of lapping.
1second of crackling.
8 seconds of lapping.
1 second of crackling.
19 seconds of lapping.
1 second of crackling.
25 seconds of lapping.
1 second of crackling.
35 seconds of lapping.
6 seconds of the whistle of a blackbird.1974
1970
As noted, the influence of Symbolism and Cubism on the Italian Futurists is significant .
Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexey Kruchenykh, “The Word as Such,” Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary
Ann Caws (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2001), 238.
1972
Marinetti, Founding and Manifesto, 186.
1973
Bok, “When Cyborgs Versify,” 131.
1974
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, “A Landscape Heard,” PMV1, 210-1.
1971
327
The Russian concern with origins is more clearly audible in the work of the Dada poets – notably Hugo
Ball, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters – who seek a “pristine Adamic language,”1975 an ur-language
capable of capturing the most immediate and powerful sense of linguistic expression. Had they been able
to approximate this ideal, the Dada sound poets would almost certainly have produced some of the most
significant works of minimalism. In performance, however, austere scores, often little more than a short
sequences of phonemes, take on a remarkable intensity. Despite their advocacy of “purely abstract
form,”1976 the search for an ur-language is finally a deeply referential activity and one rooted in a rather
ill-informed concept of the primitive.
The theurgical element of this work recalls the connection of sound poetry to various elements of
religious chant – sonically evident in works such as Hausmann‟s passion incantation “K‟Perioum” (Track
39),1977 and at various points of the large-scale Ur-Sonate (Sonata in Primitive Sounds) by Kurt
Schwitters. Of more immediate interest than the extreme theatricality of this work – its purposeful
exaggerations, the ritualistic mannerism of its intonation, the self-conscious and often virtuosic patterning
of its articulation – is its significance in reviving through an overtly textual form the transgenericism so
successfully exploited by opera. To accomplish this, these poets pursue new ways of notating sound
poetry, developing optophonic or vocovisual1978 scores designed to create a more immediate and accurate
integration of letter, shape and sound1979 – a unified poietic script which works towards a sense of
interartistic presence. Ordinary musical notation, while very accurate, functions by layering visual
information: words are generally written below the melodic syntax of time-pitches, installing a certain
discontinuity between musical and verbal information which can only be overcome by careful rehearsal
(or genuinely specialist knowledge), and so is neither as immediate, nor as accessible, as one might hope.
According to Drucker, “the idea that the poetic page can be constructed along the same lines as a musical
score is an idea that has been rediscovered periodically and made use of by poets in various ways.” 1980
The modern prototype is offered by the Zaum poet, Iliazd, as well as in the simultaneous poetry of Tzara,
Huelsenbeck and Janco in which three texts in different languages are recited concurrently, represented
on a single score in which the alternation of space and letter reflects the poets‟ utterance and silence. 1981
More elaborate is the system developed by Kurt Schwitters, whose abiding concern was with “an ever
1975
Pegrum, Challenging Modernity, 262; Bök, Cyborgs, 131.
DSCMA, 116
1977
Raoul Hausmann, K’Perioum, 1918.
1978
Rothenberg and Joris, Introduction, xvii.
1979
Dachy, Dada, 37-8.
1980
Drucker, “Visual Performance,” 138.
1981
Ibid.; DS, 15; Nicholas Zurbrugg, “Towards the End of the Line: Dada and Experimental Poetry Today,” Dada
Spectrum, 228.
1976
328
greater integration and equivalence of the various facets of his artistic oeuvre.”1982 The Ursonate very
precisely follows the formal structure of music, most audibly in the recurring theme of the opening rondo,
and the da capo section of the third movement, a scherzo and trio (Track 40).1983 If the “concept of
orchestrating verbal language through visual means became a mainstay of experimental poetics in the
twentieth century,”1984 this is nowhere more remarkably exemplified than in John Cage‟s 1968 anthology
Notations. In a collection emblematic of early postmodernism at its most utopian, Cage gathers an
unparalleled sample of contemporary scores. These range from traditional calligraphic manuscripts and
experimental scores which are still recognizably musical, to electronic scores, instructions for
performance pieces offered by some of the leading members of Fluxus, and works which clearly situate
themselves within the lineage of concretism. Incorporating photography, cartography, geometry and
various numerical notations, many of these works implicitly problematize the relationship of threedimensional space, visuality, language and sound.
d) Losing voice and concrete intensification
By consolidating within a single medium, the visual, sonic, verbal and representational parts of a poetic
scheme, the score itself becomes a significant genre of avant-gardist poietic pursuit.1985 John Cage,
perhaps the most tireless avant-gardist of all, develops a range of techniques, from the early linear
patterns of “Lecture on Nothing,”1986 which clearly reflect the influence of Schwitters,1987 to the
perceptibly entropic logic of “Empty Words,” in which strange verbal attractors and temporary points of
linguistic stability increasingly disintegrate to dispersed phonemes, and eventually drifting, chaotic letters
(Figure 97). These contrasting styles are mirrored in various of Cage‟s performances: “Lecture on
Nothing” follows the spatially determined pace and pauses of its score, while “Empty Words,” drenched
1982
Rothenberg and Joris, Introduction, xvi.
Kurt Schwitters, “Scherzo and Trio,” Ursonate, 1922-32.
1984
Drucker, Visual Performance, 139.
1985
Arguably, in certain poetic situations, it is the score which alone consolidates the verbal, visual, sonic and
conceptual aspects of the poem itself, and which allows for their actual performance. Drucker defines this
phenomenon in terms of a visual performativity which “derives from the conviction that there is a form of poetry
that inheres in visual means that cannot be reproduced in another visual format without destroying the work or
radically altering its signification producing qualities” (Drucker, “Visual Performance,” 149).
1986
John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” Silence: Lectures and writings (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 109-27.
1987
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, Introduction, PPPPPP: Poems, Performance Pieces, Proses, Plays,
Poetics, by Kurt Schwitters, eds. and trans. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993),
xvi. According to Rothenberg and Joris, Schwitters‟ influence is perceptible in other icons of postmodern aesthetics,
including Claes Oldenburg, Alan Kaprow (ibid.), Robert Wilson (ibid., xvii), Bryon Gysin, William S. Burroughs
(ibid., xix-xx) and Jackson Mac Low (ibid., xxxii).
1983
329
in the pathos of its growing vacuity, is replete with groans, sobs and hisses – the haunting stutters of
words almost conscious of their own disintegration, of phonemes which are no longer able to cohere
(Track 41).1988 There are significant resonances between Cage‟s task of “making language saying nothing
at all”1989 and Beckett‟s syntax of weakness. Despite notable stylistic differences – style, at least, in the
sense imparted by Danto‟s understanding of “what remains of a representation when we subtract its
content”1990 – both writers pursue inarticulacy as a philosophical accomplishment. For Beckett, this
results from a progressive conviction that language is a concrete phenomenon, the marker of an existential
persistence. Its failure to fix the externality to which it refers exposes a delicate aperture to the poietic
force which we wontedly name the imagination. Here the brutality of material finitude – of the body in
space – comes up against the infinity of thought.
Beckett tirelessly searches for the medium which might convey this impasse, or narrate this lacuna. The
condensed intensities of his early prose and poetry give way to an austere drama of repetitive action and
absurd dialogue. Finally, at its most minimal, Beckett‟s work discovers an intermedium. Textual
technologies – writing, typescript and the page – expand by their imbrication with action, movement and
performance, and subsequently radio, film and television. Every medium which expresses itself in terms
of agency, is symmetrically negated by its intermediary participation, so that these are marked instead by
what they fail fully to signify – a growing voicelessness; sometimes mute, but at others the primal sounds
of linguistic disintegration. At the heart of the intermedium, therefore, is the recognition of a gap – the
void – which no conceptualization or practice of nothingness can dissolve or resolve. In Beckett‟s oeuvre
the void is often marked by self-conscious, even exaggerated, rhetorical gaps: verbal and structural
ellipses, interruptions and disjunctions; repetitions which both cover and draw attention to narrative
disunities and sudden shifts of perspective; physical movements, sometimes rapid and predetermined, at
other times painfully tentative and slight, which mark invisible fields of containment and impassable
empty spaces. As Abbot adjudges the situation: “[t]o speak of nothing as the place of generation
(language, the unconscious) or, conversely, as a purity of emptiness (vacancy without end) is to put
something there in the place of nothing and to that degree to anchor it.”1991 This is indeed the case from
the perspective of the work as phenomenon, and perhaps what the poem – that is, a predicate of poiesis, or
1988
John Cage, Empty Words. Wergo, 1991.
John Cage, “Empty Words,” Empty Words (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1980), 51.
1990
Ibid., 197.
1991
H. Porter Abbot, “Narrative,” Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (Houndmills:
Palgrave, 2004), 9-10.
1989
330
a product of production – is able to teach us: “there is no resolving its uncertainties without disengaging
from the work itself.”1992
Here it is necessary to reassert that existence is subtracted from, rather than simply coextensive with
Being. This recognition arises from the fundamental axiom of Badiou‟s ontology – that “the one is not,
but any structure, even the axiomatic structure of ontology, establishes that there are uniquely ones and
multiples,”1993or, in other words, that while being qua being is pure multiplicity, from this pure
multiplicity are nonetheless subtracted beings. In this light, it might seem counterintuitive to assert that
the void, or nothing, is the most proper part of being.1994 Yet this is the case precisely to the extent that the
void is inconsistent; for inconsistent multiplicity is the fundamental ontological atmosphere of all
possibility. That which is consistent or presented in existence, is subtracted from, without negating, the
inconsistent multiplicity of pure being, so that what is void is distributed between Being and existence –
“scattered all over, nowhere and everywhere;”1995 “the name of unpresentation in presentation.”1996 In this
light, “nothing is as much that of structure, thus of consistency, as that of the pure multiple, thus of
inconsistency.”1997
The void names the minimal displacement between Being and existence, “the unperceivable
gap…between presentation as structure and presentation as structured-presentation.”1998 In this light, the
gaps in Beckett‟s writing suggest more than omission, expressive incapacity, or even the dialectic
opposition of finitude and infinitude. Rather, these conceptual cavities – travelling between idea, word,
inscription and sound – attempt to translate into poietic terms the manner in which the void is the
prerequisite in order that existence be subtracted from pure Being, acting as a “suture to being.”1999 In two
of Beckett‟s radio pieces – “Words and Music”2000 and “Cascando”2001 – the poetic intuition of the void
discovers a significant, if enigmatic, presentation. Exemplifying an intimate negotiation of language,
sound, performance and technology,2002 we encounter here the exploration of an intermedium, the shifting
1992
Ibid., 10.
Badiou, BE, 59.
1994
Ibid., 56.
1995
Ibid., 55.
1996
Ibid.
1997
Ibid.
1998
Ibid., 54.
1999
Ibid., 55.
2000
Samuel Beckett, “Words and Music: A piece for radio,” CDW, 285-94.
2001
Samuel Beckett, “Cascando: A radio piece for music and voice,” CDW, 295-304.
2002
It is possible to count Beckett‟s radio works as sonic objects for the manner in which they test, in theory and
practice, the coherence and effectiveness of sound.
1993
331
boundaries of which subtly instantiate the principles of the sonic object poem. In both works, the
association of generation with authorial force, is embodied by two characters who attempt to orchestrate
the relationship of word to music.2003 In “Words and Music,” making obvious reference to the relation of
the faltering voice to the recognition of finitude compelled by the fading potency of old age, this role is
taken by Croak. The action of the play takes shape around Croak‟s adjudication of the association
between words and music – Beckett, with admirable bluntness, names the former Words or Joe, the latter
Music or Bob.
Beckett aims “to cast words and music on the same footing.”2004 In this sense he draws on a notion of
music which resonates with the classical Greek model, the primary informant of the operatic tradition,
despite the fact that, in practice, the literary content of operatic libretti is commonly subordinate to their
melodic representation.2005 As Zilliacus asserts, “Words and Music” is “the closest thing there is in the
Beckett canon to opera.”2006 The initial attempts of Words to impress Croak with the meaningful verbal
elaboration of the latter‟s feelings and existential situation, are brought into conflict with Music, which
responds to Words programmatically, at first matching then exceeding through its immediacy that which
in verbal representation is only approximate. For Ackerley and Gontarski, Croak is a mediator. 2007
However, he is also a poet, whose orchestration of an alternation between words and music is a deliberate
experiment in interruption, a gesture of self-limitation, a self-imposed lacuna. At the command of Croak –
“Together. [Pause. Thump.] Together! [Pause. Violent thump.] Together, dogs!”2008 – Words and Music
begin an awkward interplay, “[t]wice culminating in near-operatic sequences.”2009 Finally, we are left
with a strong sense of the “shaping power of music in poetic composition,”2010 and that the lyrical
endeavours of Words alone fail to live up to the immediacy of Music. The vision here is not of linguistic
impotence, per se, but of a lacuna inhabiting the modern lyrical project which, defeated by its own
sophistication, misses its radically productive potential.
2003
“Croak and Opener are formally in command...[y]et whether they drive or are driven is uncertain” (Katherine
Worth, “Words for Music Perhaps,” Samuel Beckett and Music, ed. Mary Bryden (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 10.
2004
Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and
Television (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1976), 101.
2005
Ibid.
2006
Ibid., 103. This is the case, despite Beckett‟s apparent animosity to opera early in his career (ibid.).
2007
Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 650.
2008
Beckett, “Words and Music,” 289.
2009
Worth, “Words,” 13
2010
Ibid.,16.
332
Initially entitled Calando, the musical term for fading away,2011 Beckett‟s “Cascando,” is a near “mirror
image”2012 of “Words and Music.” Opener performs a function structurally identical to that of Croak,
coordinating the discontinuous narrative of Voice – whose “[l]ow, panting”2013 speech, fragmented by
ellipses and irregular modular repetition, tries to relate the story of an ill-formed character, Woburn – with
the unspecified melodies of Music. Attempting to discover a functional medium for the translation of
reality, Opener self-consciously manipulates the aperture of poietic activity: “I open and close,”2014 he
tells us. Yet the ideal poietic medium proves evasive, since the greatest gap of all is not between the Real
and the art which represents it, but in the void which art demands of us – the sheer vacuity of subjective
knowledge, and the existential vertigo which accompanies the self-awareness which the artist necessarily
courts, all of which are recurrent concerns of Beckett‟s oeuvre. Opener‟s resignation to self-doubt is
exemplary in this respect:
What do I open?
They say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it‟s in his head…
I don‟t protest any more, I don‟t say any more,
There is nothing in my head.
I don‟t answer any more.
I open and close.2015
Opener attempts to overcome the increasing dissolution of subjective stability by repeating, with a
stubborn futility, his attempts to prescribe the ideal interaction between language and music within which
the work might take place. At first presented separately, language and music subsequently sound in
unison, but even when he “open[s] both”2016 the synthesis they find is, at best, uncomfortable2017 – a
forced simultaneism, perhaps.
“Cascando” instantiates several of minimalism‟s most characteristic aesthetic techniques. Through the
significant reduction of sound effects,2018 it presents an order of sonic containment which demands of
language and music a radically reciprocal generativity. Simultaneously, it is possible to recognize, in the
2011
Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 83.
Ibid., 84.
2013
Beckett, Cascando, 297.
2014
Ibid., 300.
2015
Ibid.
2016
Ibid., 298.
2017
Worth describes “the two streams of creativity...[as] separate but collaborative” (Worth, “Words,” 17), but even
this is an optimistic interpretation of their interaction.
2018
Stanley Richardson and Jane Alison Hale, “Working Wireless: Beckett‟s Radio Writing,” Samuel Beckett and
the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York and London: Garland, 1999),
291.
2012
333
dotted lines through which Beckett represents Music‟s contribution to “Cascando,” the reduction of
textual and sonic presentation to a series of repeated blank marks. In the very indiscernibility of the
referent of this transcription, it is possible to recognize an implicit transumption – the poietic
displacement of sound into a minimal script of identical, minimal and essentially contentless marks, 2019
charged, in turn, by the prospective reformulation of these marks in terms of sound. Properly poietic, yet
in no sense containing the poietic substance of the work, the atopianism of such transumption reveals, at
the heart of its sonic object, an existential intensity which we might provisionally term voidal proximity –
a closeness between two or more aesthetic points of contact with the void.2020
In this light, there are considerable implications of the ideal state towards which these intermedia
experiments of Beckett yearn – the solid sound, or the instantiation of pure poetico-musical coincidence
and presence. Such solid sound would dispel existential doubt, by locating, by means of such voidal
proximity, the void itself, upon which not only poiesis, but the very consistency of any situation, is
forwarded. This is a fantasy central to the modern conception of the poem, as Badiou notes,2021 and one
which is also distinctly minimalist. For when we recognize the void, we recognize the most minimal
condition of any situation. It is towards this same voidal sonic centre that Cage urges poietic work when,
in “Empty Words,” he notes that “a text for a song can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be just syllables,
just words; just a string of phrases; sentences. Or combinations of [these].”2022 Finally, he institutes the
“equation between letters and silence”2023 which is as much visually reflected in the work‟s score as it is
in any of its sonic substance. Jackson Mac Low‟s scores are no less eclectic. The influence of Cage is
often clearly in evidence. At other times, Mac Low‟s work takes on a distinctly expressionistic character:
a concern with the intimacy of vision and sound, with the singularity of handwritten manuscripts for
gathas – sacred verses intended for recitation in various of the traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism –
which perhaps translate into contemporary practice not only these forms, but also that which Khlebnikov
and Kruchenykh had envisaged when they suggested that “[o]ur handwriting, distinctively altered by our
mood, conveys that mood…independently of the words.”2024
2019
Worth, “Words,” 17.
By aesthetic points I mean the objects or parts of objects proper to any aesthetic code, practice or discipline.
Here one of these points is the dotted lines representing music, which is textual-linguistic, while the other is the
music in its actual sounding, which is implied in the text, but which must be realized in any complete performance
of Cascando.
2021
“[P]oetry propagates the idea of an intuition of the nothing in which being would reside when there is not even
the site for such intuition” (Badiou, BE, 54).
2022
Cage, “Empty Words,” 11.
2023
Ibid., 51.
2024
Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, “The Letter as Such,” 236.
2020
334
Figure 97: John Cage, Empty Words, 1980.
Given that the development of sound poetry is shaped on the one hand by a paradigm established in the
music of classical Greece, and on the other by an apparently transhistorical yearning for a primal
language, the discovery of a theurgical preponderance in even the contemporary genre. One need only
catch a few moments of Ernst Jandl‟s2025 “Ode auf N” to recognize the morphological experiments of the
futurists, and the ritualistic incantations of the Dadaist are similarly audible in works as diverse as the
somewhat contrived, quasi-primitivism of British poet Bob Cobbing, and the juxtaposition of European
and South American musical and poetic elements in the work of Brazilian practitioner of “Intersign
2025
Of this poet of the Viennese school of concrete poetry Bann remarks that, “[i]n fact Jandl is concerned not
simply with sound but with time,” (Bann, Introduction, 13) although Bann is careful to highlight both the
confluences between concrete and sound poetry, as well as the point at which they depart from one another (ibid.).
335
poetry,”2026 Philadelpho Menezes. In Bök‟s estimation, various contemporary genres of performance
poetry – amongst them the ludic improvisations of groups like the Four Horseman, and the “jazzified
theatrics that have gone on to characterize „spokenword‟ performers…many of whom vocalize „def rap‟
from memory at slams”2027 – derive their momentum from musical metaphor, much as does Schwitters‟
Ursonate.2028
e) The technology of solid sounds
To appreciate the contemporary significance of sound poetry – its pivotal role in the development of
aesthetic concretism, as well as the radical potential of minimalism it harnesses – we must supplement the
traditional conviction that within the voice it is possible to discover something authentic and uncorrupted
from our past. Vocality, beyond the most immediate means of bodily performance, must be
reconceptualized as a technology – it can be recorded, transmitted, altered and combined without
undermining its integrity presenting itself as a flexible means of coming to the heart of poiesis. Steven
Connor‟s2029 conceptual construct, the vocalic body, provides a useful means of clarifying the growing
technical autonomy of the voice, an autonomy which significantly bolsters its claim to being able to
constitute sonic objects:
Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves produce bodies. The vocalic body is…a projection
of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the
voice…The leading characteristic of the voice-body is to be a body-in-invention, an impossible, imaginary
body in the course of being found and formed…[It is] also the characteristic ways in which the voice seems
to precipitate itself as an object, upon which it can then itself give the illusion of acting. 2030
In Bök‟s estimation, contemporary technology compounds the situation, central to Connor‟s argument, in
which we are “ever more detached from our voices.”2031 The technologically mediated voice – intensified
or duplicated by various technologies of amplification, capture or reproduction – confirms the autonomy
of effect exercised by vocalic bodies. Indeed, the majority of recorded music, radio, and film would
2026
Philadelpho Menezes, “Intersign Poetry: Visual and Sound Poetics in the Technologizing of Culture,” EVC, 262.
Bök, “Cyborgs,” 131.
2028
Ibid., 132.
2029
Connor provides a useful discussion of implications of the technological mediation of the voice in the work of
Samuel Beckett (Connor, Samuel Beckett, 127-35).
2030
Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 35-6.
2031
Bök, “Cyborgs,” 129.
2027
336
sacrifice its potency were it not possible to judge the vocalic body which is instantiated by these
technologies as being of equal existential status to the embodied voice. This is not to say that a voice
needs to be a recognizably human one, however. Henri Chopin‟s sound poetry, for example, realizes of its
most impactful moments by blending the amplified atmospherics of recording with such unvocalized
vocalic bodies as breath – “Espaces et gestes” (Track 42)2032 is exemplary in this respect.
“Technologies of vocal recording, vocal telephony, and vocal synthesis”2033 find an increasingly
significant place in contemporary sound poetry. We find ourselves in a situation in which the inherited
model of anthropocentric recitation, fuelled by its theurgical radix, seems “all but untenable in the face of
our technological augmentations, which already threaten to overwhelm the organic coherence of any
unified performer.”2034 Our finest contemporary sound poets are those who separate themselves from the
stubborn mainstream fetish – “the performative authenticity of a sincere speaker”2035 – focusing instead
on work generated in relation to sound itself.
The virtuosity of Jaap Blonk‟s “Zamongi Grin” (Track 43),2036 for example, explores a spectrum of vocal
techniques for generating subtle timbrel shifts within the framework of a steady pulse. The remarkable
effect of this work derives not from its opposition to the mimetic associations of the voice, as one might
expect, but by presenting in a number of rapid shifts precisely how vocality transects the simple
anthropocentric compartmentalization historically imposed upon it. Within the framework of a steady
pulse – one which strongly recalls the minimalist technique which Reich famously deploys in Music for
18 Musicians – Blonk experiments with various vocalic permutations much as one might do in trying to
master elementary software for computer-generated music. At times musical references are unmistakeable
– rudimentary accented patterns, such as might be practised on a snare-drum, and some combination of
pinching the nose, contracting the vocal fold and rhythmically tapping the larynx, reproduces the timbre
of a Jew‟s harp with remarkable accuracy. Other progressions more closely resemble an experiment in
phonemic morphology, incorporating sounds which are singularly associable with French, Flemish and
Dutch. What is clarified most by Blonk‟s sound poem, however, is that the sheer immanence of the
vocalic body in the best sound poetry relegates its mimetic attachments to a position of secondary
2032
Henri Chopin, Espaces et Gestes, 1950.
Ibid.
2034
Ibid., 130.
2035
Ibid., 133.
2036
Jaap Blonk, Zamongi Grin, 1998.
2033
337
significance. Here the voice has independent substance – is a self-sustaining “body-in-invention,” to
recall Connor, which “seems to precipitate itself as an object.”
Insofar as it instantiates the vocalic body as a poietic entity which requires no external confirmation for its
integrity, or addendum for its justification, this type of sound poem constitutes an important species of
concretism. Such concretism, in turn, expresses a significant form of minimalism to the extent that its
autopoietic status can be regarded as actual, and not merely symbolic. More often than not, however,
sound poetry which remains coupled to the voice is drawn back into an interminable hermeneutic
interplay, and so quickly is absorbed by the mimetic scale of most criticism – its manner of weighing all
art in relation to an anthropomorphic vision of the Real, a paradigm which Badiou identifies as the
dominant one in the West, which views the aesthetic in terms of a “subject for enjoyment and the
experimentation of the limits of the body.”2037 In this manner, it is all too readily consigned to an
exponentially expanding dump of interesting but failed poetic experiments.
Technological attempts to overcome this historical barrier are numerous. Yet, as Bök remarks, despite this
remarkable potential, “only a spartan coterie of sound poets have ever committed themselves to the use of
such technology.”2038 The investigation of this vastly underexplored poietic field remains an urgent task
for prospective study. The most obvious and popular set of instruments used at the intersection of sound
poetry and technology is the vocoder, a class of instruments which are designed to analyze speech,
deconstitute it into electrical information, and then synthesize it as a vocalic body independent of its
source. These are widely used in almost all genres of contemporary music – Fischerspooner‟s “Emerge”
(Track 44)2039 presents a suitable example of a standard use of the vocoder in popular electronica – and in
much progressive sound poetry, Paul Lansky‟s “Idle Chatter,” (Track 45),2040 for instance.
There exist near limitless processes of synthesizing sonic material, or “transforming sounds by cutting
and splicing, retarding, accelerating or reversing,”2041 using means ranging from the “audio-frequency
oscillators, variable speed turntables...[and] generator whines,”2042 of early electronic experimentation, to
the rapidly evolving software currently in use and under development. With the provocative proposition
2037
Badiou, “The Subject of Art.”.
Bök, “Cyborgs,” 132.
2039
Fischerspooner, “Emerge,” #1. Capitol, 2001.
2040
Paul Lansky, “Idle Chatter,” More Than Idle Chatter. Bridge, 1994.
2041
F. C. Judd, Electronic Music and Musique Concrete (London: Neville Spearman, 1961),63.
2042
Nyman, Experimental Music, 40.
2038
338
that “[w]e are perhaps the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect in our lifetime to write
poems for a machine audience,”2043 Christian Bök argues that the vanguard of sound poetry manifests in a
move away from the ritualistic and verbal, towards a “hitherto undreamt poetics of electronica.” 2044 The
Cyborg Opera, a “linguistic soundscape which responds to the ambient chatter of technology,” 2045 retains
the familiar shift in sound poetry from semantic to phonic values, recalling the tradition established by the
Russian futurists, but more specifically identifies its models more specifically in Marinetti‟s work with its
celebration of accelerating mechanization,2046 Chopin,2047 and the experimental beatboxers, Razael and
Dokaka.2048
In his discussion of electronica, Simon Emmerson usefully distinguishes between abstract musical
substance2049 – with no point of reference but its own sounds – and mimetic musical substance. Sonic
mimesis, in this sense, is either timbrel, in which case it manifests in terms of the “direct imitation of the
timbre („colour‟) of the natural sound,”2050 or syntactic, determined by the interrelation of sonic events, in
other words.2051 He notes, moreover, that in practice every musical discourse combines the mimetic and
the abstract. This is exploited in productive ways by electronic composers, who have developed
technology to capture, generate and fuse different types of sound with relative ease. Consequently,
resolving the tension between mimesis and abstraction, or between the primal and the technological, is a
less pressing concern for the contemporary sound poet than is moving beyond the traditional
understanding that vocality is essential to poetry.
The proliferation of electronic literature, new media interart, and virtual aesthetic communities, presents
an important step in this process of poietic revolution, the momentum for which derives in no small part
from the resources made freely available by organizations such as PennSound,2052 Ubuweb2053 and the
Electronic Literature Organization.2054 Intermedia poets – babel, geniwate, Damian Everett and Stuart
Moulthrop amongst them – continue to propel their diverse hypermedia experiments forcefully into the
2043
Bök, “Cyborgs,” 129.
Ibid., 129.
2045
Ibid., 129.
2046
Ibid., 131.
2047
Ibid., 132, 136.
2048
Ibid., 135-6.
2049
Simon Emmerson, “The Relation of Language to Materials,” The Language of Electroacoustic Music, ed. Simon
Emmerson (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1986), 19.
2050
Ibid., 18.
2051
Ibid.
2052
Pennsound, 20 November 2011 < http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/>
2053
Ubuweb, 20 November 2011.< http://ubu.com/>
2054
Electronic Literature Organization, 20 November 2011.< http://www.eliterature.org/>
2044
339
cultural fray with a subversive, political awareness which parallels if not exceeds such street artists as
Banksy and Space Invader. Meanwhile, journals like poemsthatgo2055 – founded and edited by Megan
Sapner and Ingrid Ankerson – continue to provide less archival forums for the aesthetic and polemical
activities of the hyper-avant-garde. 2056 If, from one perspective, the best sound poetry is deeply minimal –
eschewing the ordinary economy of reference and substituting in its place the immediacy of its takingplace as sonic object poem – it nonetheless retains a deep connection to its mimetic radix insofar as its
range remains contingent on vocality or to technologies designed to overcome the problem of vocality. It
is for this reason that only the most extreme conception of sound poetry, and its most radically minimal
instantiations, manifest externally to the voice, or, at least, at the point at which the anthropocentric
anchor of the voice begins to dematerialize.2057 At this point, where the sound object is autonomous,
concrete sound poetry begins.
14. CONCRETISM AS AN EXEMPLARY VEHICLE FOR MINIMALISM
a) A concrete continuum
While the venerable lineages of both visual and sonic poetry suggest their transhistorical poetic vocation,
it is also true that at certain nodal moments of peak generative intensity,2058 their capacity for
transgressing any particular medium is so concrete and so specific as almost to be singular to a particular
work. We might well recognize such works as concrete theoretical objects:2059 aesthetic entities in which
the taking-place of poiesis is directed in so strong a self-reflexive manner, that ordinary concerns of
2055
Poems That Go, 20 November 2011.< http://poemsthatgo.com/>
Archival sites include PennSound, Ubuweb and the Electronic Poetry Centre.
2057
This is position marked by the technological mediation of the voice, and although it is not limited to any
particular historical epoch by necessity, the majority of its objects appear in recent modernity.
2058
Respectively, Perloff and Watten believe that such moments emerge from the aesthetics of Futurism and
Constructivism, whereas philosophers such as Badiou (event) and Heidegger (Ereignis) conceptualize these in terms
of the generic or universal conditions of their emergence.
2059
Here I bring together two terms significantly, but incompletely, invoked above.
2056
340
aesthetic production and mimesis are suppressed to the extent that the work appears genuinely selfproductive. The manner in which such radically autonomous entities reflexively problematize their own
media and constituent material, the present study delineates in terms of aesthetic concretism.
The term Concrete Art derives from Theo van Doesburg‟s 1930 manifesto, which represents a point of
confluence between the formalist abstraction of Bauhaus and De Stijl, and the enthusiasm of Futurism and
Dadaism. At this juncture, occupied by such artists as Arp, Bill and van Doesburg,2060 the suggestion
arises that the universality of art be sought at the intersection of the conceptual and the concrete – another
provocative formulation of the Real.2061 It is worth emphasizing, with Osborne and Alexander, that two
distinct types of abstraction are evident in most aesthetic media. The first involves a reductive extraction
of components or essential structures from their imbrication in a complex situation, or the deduction of
transcendental principles from the interaction of parts. The second conceives of abstraction as original or
fundamental – a situation which precedes, or is entirely indifferent to, any referential, representation or
semantic responsibility.2062
Concretism opposes the first sense of abstraction entirely, as is evident in Arp‟s manifesto: “[w]e don‟t
want to copy nature. We don‟t want to reproduce, we want to produce…Since this art doesn‟t have the
slightest trace of abstraction, we name it: concrete art.”2063 It is opposition to this type of abstraction
which also informs Bann‟s position that abstraction “is in fact almost the antithesis of concrete, [since]
the concrete procedure is inductive, while that of the abstract is reductive.”2064 However, considering the
second understanding of abstraction as the aesthetic pursuit of an original, non-referential, materialism,
we uncover equally plausible claims to the contrary. For Theo van Doesburg such art is concrete precisely
to the extent that it is abstract, the former insofar as “[t]he work…must be entirely conceived and formed
in the mind before its execution,”2065 and the latter in that the work must be “entirely constructed from
purely plastic elements.”2066 It is to this sense of abstraction the Caws refers in claiming not only that
“concrete is thus related to abstract art,”2067 but, further, that “[c]oncretism abstracts the object from all
attachment to reference, seeing it as obliged only by its own rules.”2068 Thus is it that the ideal concrete
2060
See Bann, “Introduction,” 8.
Indeed, in numerous places above such an intersection might legitimately be indentified in terms of the Real.
2062
See Alexander, Minimalism, 182.
2063
Jean (Hans) Arp, “Concrete Art,” Manifesto, 524.
2064
Bann, “Introduction,” 25.
2065
Theo van Doesburg, “Basics of Concrete Painting,” Manifesto, 520.
2066
Ibid.
2067
Mary Ann Caws, “Concretism,” Manifesto, 518 (518-9).
2068
Ibid.
2061
341
work “should have its own form, that it should be somehow original,”2069 in Higgins‟ estimation, and to
this extent related to a tradition of self-executing high modernism.
In the visual field, concretism anticipates several key minimalist principles, aiming to be “simple and
visually controllable…[and] exact…[in an e]ffort for absolute clarity.”2070 Its musical analogue, although
to some extent anticipated by the Futurists and Dadaists, is discovered in Musique Concrète, principally
associated with the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry – remarkable collagic works constructed
from spliced samples of musical and everyday sound. Equally, Steve Reich‟s initial decision to label his
work musique répétetive rather than minimalism, sounds a terminological echo of Musique Concrète. The
early tape works, It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out (Track 46),2071 are not only amongst the truly excellent
minimalist process compositions, but might easily be counted particularly fine examples of concrete
sound poetry.
Yet, it is in the broad arena of literature that concretism discovers its most fertile, and also contested,
ground. Considerable disagreement persists regarding the precise extent to which this field might be
unified by historical, aesthetic or theoretical considerations. Stephen Bann approaches Concrete poetry as
an international, historical movement. Bann identifies as its progenitors2072 the Swiss poet, Eugen
Gomringer (Figure 98)2073 – whose work makes extensive use of repetition and omission to effect a
process of forming and shaping at the heart of the poem2074 – and the Brazilian Noigrandes group. The
latter‟s Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry resulted in a particular aesthetic and political cohesion between
Decio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, his brother Augusto de Campos (Figure 99),2075 Ronaldo Azeredo
and Jose Lino Grünewald.2076 This association centred on their development of a contemporary
ideogrammatic language2077 – the verbivocovisual, a synaesthetic synergy generated by the “phonemic,
ideogrammatic, paragrammatic character of the morphemes and words themselves.”2078 The
verbivocovisual expresses itself in terms of a literary structure-content – a term deployed to indicate the
2069
Higgins, “Symphosymposium,” 411.
Caws, “Concretism,” 518.
2071
Steve Reich, “Come Out,” Early Works. Nonesuch, 1987.
2072
The Noigrandes poets began writing concrete poetry in 1952, and Gomringer in 1953 (Bann, “Introduction,” 7).
See ibid., 14.
2073
Eugen Gomringer, “wind,” CPIA, 37.
2074
Ibid., 8-9.
2075
Augusto de Campos, “terremoto,” ACP, 49.
2076
Ibid., 14-5.
2077
Ibid., 15-6
2078
Perloff, “Concrete Prose,” 145.
2070
342
manner in which the structure and content of the poem are at once reflexive and reflective of one another,
appealing to the immediacy of non-verbal communication2079 while pressing beyond any simplistic knot
of sensation and medium.2080
Figure 98: Eugen Gomringer, wind, 1954.
Figure 99: Augusto de Campos, terremoto, 1957.
(ovo = egg; novel – bail of thred; novo = new; sol = sun; estrala = star;
soletra = (it) spells; so = only; terremoto = earthquake; temor = fear; more
= death; metro = metre; thermometro = thermometre.
Towards the end of the 1950s, groups of concrete poets arose in Darmstadt (Claus Bremer and Emmett
Williams) and Vienna (Gerhard Rühm and Friedrich Achleitner, who were further affiliated with Ernst
Jandl – principally a sound poet), affirming some sort of affiliation, either in terms of their publications or
aesthetic positions, with the enterprises of Gomringer or the Noigrandes group. Bann identifies a second
generation of concrete poets – in Scotland, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan; in England Dom
Sylvester Houédard, Josh Furnival and Bann himself; in France, the spatialists,2081 Ilse and Pierre Garnier;
in the United States, Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams, Robert Lax and Emmett Williams (who was
affiliated with Bremer in Darmstadt).2082
2079
Bann, “Introduction,” 15.
See Perloff, “Concrete Prose,” 144-5.
2081
Spatialism seeks to redefine words in terms of their interaction with space, especially with regard to the
definition of concepts of cosmos (ibid., 19).
2082
Ibid., 19-25.
2080
343
Although Bann recognizes that there exists a “difficulty of assigning a precise limit to the field of
Concrete Poetry once the periphery of small groups and well-defined traditions has been left behind,”2083
this does not dissuade him from offering a typology which is unapologetic in its identification of
concretism in terms of a specific movement. Similar claims regarding the inextricability of this poetry
from the notion of a movement are forwarded by Augusto de Campos,2084 Haroldo de Campos,2085 Claus
Clüver2086 and Harry Polkinhorn2087 regarding the composition of a distinct movement of Concrete poets.
For Bann, such a movement is related to, at times coextensive with, but finally distinct from, sonic and
visual poetry. To this view we might contrast that of Dick Higgins, who claims that “Concrete poetry is
one of the main forms of visual poetry,”2088 yet remains curiously hostile to the notion of concretism as
the marker of a movement.2089 Nonetheless Bann and Higgins seem to agree, superficially at least, that at
the heart of this poetry is something distinctly literary, although for the former this literariness derives
from an interartistic dialectic of sorts, whereas for the latter, it is almost subtracted from a rather more
vague intermedial plenum which stretches across both culture and epoch.
Where Higgins regards concretism as a “fiction invented by analogy,”2090 numerous others are more
hospitable to the notion that it constitutes a broad aesthetic modality. Luciano Nanni describes it as “a
way of being of the art work…[which] reduce[s] communication…to its physical matter”2091 in order to
revivify the sense in which thought transverses the artwork “in a presemiotic way.”2092 McCaffery
similarly considers concretism “a fundamental force”2093 revealed transgenerically by an “heuristic
dynamism,” in which, contra Higgins, a strong basis for connection is affirmed – one which recalls the
claim of the Noigrandes poets that concretism affirms an internal isomorphism, structural selfidentification, or structure-content.2094 In this case, the concrete poem is at once “model and
precedent,”2095 as Clüver suggests: paradigmatic – a theoretical object that acts as a cipher for all
2083
Ibid., 19.
Augusto de Campos, “Symphosymposium,” 369, 385.
2085
Haroldo de Campos, “Symphosymposium,” 385-6.
2086
Clüver, “Concrete Poetry,” 266-7.
2087
Polkinhorn, “Symphosymposium,” 371-2.
2088
Higgins, “Symphosymposium,” 371.
2089
Ibid.
2090
Higgins, “Symphosymposium,” 371.
2091
Nanni, “Symphosymposium,” 370.
2092
Ibid.
2093
McCaffery, “Symphosymposium,” 373.
2094
Bann, 14-5; Clüver, “Symphosymposium,” 386.
2095
Ibid., 377.
2084
344
concretism – as well as singular – a theoretical object that declares and reflects only upon itself qua poetic
entity.2096 In both cases the work of concretism constitutes, as Finlay suggests, a “model of order.”2097
Concretism, however one understands the term, must certainly involve at least some sort of strong
tendency towards convergence. In terms of terminological convergence, we might suggest that although
Concrete Art, Musique Concrete and Concrete Poetry are historically separate and geographically diverse,
they nonetheless share a common aesthetic pursuit in the idea of concretism. The second convergence
pertains to the intermediary status of the concrete entity itself, which emphasizes at least one of the visual,
sonic, verbal or conceptual aspects of the concrete work. Thus, it is no surprise to discover disagreement,
almost partisanship, as regards the constitution of the concrete. For Perloff, concretism “is just a
synecdoche for the larger category of visual poetry,”2098 a view endorsed by Caws, who suggests that it
“rel[ies] on slippages and ambiguities of language and on the spatial configurations of letters,” and Clüver
who regards it “a distinct genre of visual poetry.”2099 Pagano, on the other hand, champions a concretism
dominated by the sonic fascination with “words, vowels, consonants, [and] the changing play of sounds.”
Augusto de Campos maintains that concretism is a “radicalization of…the specificity of poetic language
itself,”2100 while Bernstein, in a similar, yet clearly linguistic, register maintains that the “radical
materializing dimension [of concretism]…continues unabated in the poetry…often associated with
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E… restor[ing] poetry to itself, to its medium…[while] incorporat[ing] the social
and historical registers of words and their combinations.”2101 Others understand the poetics of concretism
as conceptually coordinated: according to Castro, concretism is a “poetic conception,”2102 for Bohn, its
“value stems precisely from its conceptual bases,” while Vos claims that the concrete poem
“intensifies…awareness of the various material and linguistic „properties‟ of the verbal sign (visual, aural,
tactile, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, kinetic).”2103
The present argument holds that the conceptual and quantitative ground for the emergence of a concrete
aesthetic are not necessarily in conflict. In this light, the abstraction to which concretism appeals belongs
neither entirely to an order of active reduction, nor to one of an essential ground. Instead, might we not
characterize the search for pure concretism as one for an exemplary object which is capable of
2096
Bann, “Introduction,” 16; Caws, “Concretism,” 518.
Finlay, Model, 22. See Bann, “Introduction,” 9.
2098
Perloff, “Symphosymposium,” 395.
2099
Clüver, “Concrete Poetry,” 278.
2100
Augusto de Campos, “Symphosymposium,” 397.
2101
Bernstein, “Symphosymposium,” 372.
2102
Melo e Castro, “Symphosymposium,” 397.
2103
Voss, “Symphosymposium,” 395-6.
2097
345
demonstrating, at the heart of its existence, the instant at which concept and matter are indistinguishable?
Such would be the wager of a successfully constituted theoretical object, and amongst the many types of
theoretical objects, concrete poems offer arguably the most contained, succinct – indeed minimal – field
within which theory and praxis are perceptibly continuous. Indeed, Haroldo de Campos suggests that
concretism, at least in its geometric phase, “was minimalist poetry avant la lettre, even before the term
existed.”2104 Polkinhorn recognizes a relationship between the systems of “essentializing order or
stabilizing control” exercised by concretism and minimalism, while Clüver twice identifies concretism as
the predicate of minimalist endeavour.2105 Bann, too, observes a number of minimalist concerns in the
concrete poem – a concern with increased simplicity and compression;2106 “repetition to cancel all
particular impressions;”2107 and a self-reflexive containment and preference for closed forms.2108
An excellent minimalist concrete poem – and moreover one which exemplifies with some force the
manner in which the Noigrandes group‟s emphasis on the verbivocovisual simultaneously involves a
strong appeal to the transformatory, conceptual aspect of poiesis – is Ronaldo Azeredo‟s “Velocidade” of
1957 (Figure 100).2109 The velocidade or velocity with which the poem is concerned proves at once selfproductive and self-reflexive. Visually we deduce acceleration both through the swift descent from top to
bottom on the right of the poem, and in the more measured gathering of momentum from top right corner
to the bottom left, at which the entirety of its self-prescriptive content – velocidade or speed – is
presented. Conversely, the poem reflects an entropic loss of momentum if we read it upward from the
bottom. Transecting the poem is the voiced labiodental fricative v – a rapidly vibrating and penetrating
sonic ground; a radical sonic quantity, from which is progressively subtracted the concrete sense and
substance of this work. From top to bottom, this subtraction from the opening “VVVVVVVVVV” marks
a progressive acceleration towards the word “VELOCIDADE” which concludes the poem; while
sounding the poem from the bottom to the top effect a significant ritardando, as the v at the left of every
line grows in length until the poem is encased by “VVVVVVVVVV” – a static existential drone of sorts.
2104
Haroldo de Campos, “Symphosymposium,” 386.
Clüver, “Concrete Poetry,” 272, 279.
2106
Bann, “Introduction,” 8.
2107
Ibid.
2108
Ibid., 13. While there exist numerous examples of open-form concretism, there are a particularly great number
of concrete works dominated by visual and verbal concerns which rely on the Gestalt of the page, in which case they
habitually involve a type of deductive minimalism.
2109
Ronaldo Azeredo, “Velocidade,” ACP, 12.
2105
346
Figure 100: Ronaldo Azeredo, Velocidade, 1957.
Figure 101:Seiichi Nīkuni, Ame/Rain, 1966.
That it is possible to regard the poem as a singular, concrete entity in the very midst of the processes of its
synaesthetic taking-place, owes precisely to its self-reflexive conceptual dimension. The symmetry and
reversibility of the poem is clarified not only by its physical form, but by the fact that its conceptual
material is constitutively open: much as velocity can be steady, positive or negative, which encourages
several approaches to the process and temporality at work in the poem, so, too, the conceptual
connections between origin, poiesis, time, manifestation and change persist dialectically rather than in a
settled relationship. As regards minimalism, it is of no small account that this work reflects similar
formalist and procedural concerns as the early compositions of Philip Glass, or the serial sculpture of Sol
Le Witt. Its aesthetic method combines systematic exposition with incremental repetition – in this case,
the increments are symmetrical so that this work is a prime exemplar of the minimalist logic of
containment, which is not always the aesthetic position adopted by the work of Glass or Le Witt.
A different, but no less significant, form of minimalist concretism is evident in “Ame/Rain” (Figure
101)2110 by the Japanese poet Seeichi Nīkuni. Here we encounter a precise example of how a minimal
aesthetic gesture potentially effects dramatic poietic transformation. The subtle inscription at the bottom
centre of the page transforms what would otherwise be a largely undifferentiated and in any case
uninteresting, grid of dots into a sheet of falling rain, a powerful demonstration of the capacity of
concretism to bind together mimesis and concept through the intermediation of visuality and language.
2110
Seiichi Nīkuni, “Ame/Rain,” CRAC, 3.
347
The abstract becomes eminently concrete very suddenly, through a gesture which endorses the
recognition that thought is a type of materialism.2111 Foster notes much the same of minimalism – in
particular, of Judd‟s assertion that the abstract presents, rather than represents, the Real.2112 The present
claim is that concretism and minimalism are confluent not only on the basis of numerous stylistic
similarities, but to the extent that both are directed towards the clarification of the Real through a strongly
self-reflexive poietic programme – one which traverses every possible medium, uniting concept and
matter.
Of comparable significance is the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, a loosely defined group
associated with the eponymous journal edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews between 1978
and 1981. The journal was primarily intended for the dissemination of the theoretical and critical
manifestos of various poets all committed, as Ron Silliman notes, to “placing the issue of language, the
repressed element, at the center of the program,”2113aiming thus, in Connor‟s terms “to reaffirm the
historical materiality of words in a culture that consistently ignores and effaces this materiality.” 2114
“[T]he graphically modified noun language was used to name a journal that published about languagecentred writing…rather than examples of it,”2115 according to Watten. Such autonomy, which is
maintained between theory and practice, even amidst a poetry which quite clearly offers itself as a
theoretical practice, is strongly reminiscent of the critical situation which emerged with regard to the
minimalist visual arts. The artifacts of high Minimalism and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry are both
accompanied by a mass of theoretical literature: the latter, as Watten reminds us, “stood as a name for a
literature that could be represented but only indirectly presented,”2116 in the sense that “examples of
language-centered writing itself were not the primary content of the journal…[and that] articles about
language-centered writing were not identical to their referents.”2117
2111
See AF , 121-2; Badiou, MP, 73.
Foster, Return, 127. See ibid., 40, 44, 58, 63; Michaels, Shape, 84.
2113
Ron Silliman, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed.
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984), 131.
2114
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), 121.
2115
Barrett Watten, “The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse and Text,
Poetics Today 20.4 (1999), 586.
2116
Ibid.
2117
Ibid.
2112
348
The agenda of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets is relatively unambiguous, as defined in Silliman‟s
epochal essay,2118 “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World:” exposing the historical nature
and structure of referentiality; emphasizing the question of language; recognizing the centrality of
language to the ongoing project of class struggle.2119 For Silliman, it is capitalism which empties
language, claiming from the supposedly “natural laws …of poetry”2120 an empty yet effective fetish by
which to invent a realism suitable to its ends.2121 A principal concern of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is
therefore the critique of reference2122 – the relationship between both word and thing, and word and itself
– in order to come to terms with the simultaneously political, economic and aesthetic aspects of a metalinguistic “gestural poetry.”2123 Indeed, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry constitutes a significant field of
theoretical objects – the coincidence of theory and praxis2124 in a concrete yet also meta-discursive
writing. It revivifies the Jena romantic project which Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy term a transcendental
“poetry of poetry.”2125 Indeed, it is not mere coincidence that symcomposition – which aims to
“reconfigure[…] the politics of authorship in a form of collective practice”2126 – is a technique used in
both the Athenaeum of the Jena school, and Legend, composed by leading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets,
Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery and Ron Silliman.
Also of interest is concrete prose, which, despite its impressive range of techniques, has received little
critical attention. McHale takes note of numerous important experiments in this regard – in the physical
presentation of the book, the colour, texture, size, orientation and binding of leaves; with regard to
typography and the significance of space; and conceptually, in the manner of its self-reflexivity and
2118
See William Lavender, “Disappearance of Theory, Appearance of Praxis: Ron Silliman, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
and the Essay,”‟ Poetics Today 17.2 (1996): 188.
2119
Silliman, “Disappearance,” 131.
2120
Ibid., 122.
2121
Ibid., 122-5.
2122
Ibid., 125.
2123
Ibid., 126.
2124
Lavender disputes this point (Lavender, “Disappearance,” 183-5) and further describes it as a reactionary “way
of reading…a certain critical stance…[that] stems directly from the sudden influx to America of continental critical
thought” (ibid., 195).
2125
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 105.
2126
Watten, “Secret History,” 596. With reference to the Jena romantics, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy describe a
“principle of the collective writing of fragments…through what is referred to as „symphilosophy‟ or
„sympoetry‟…[which aims to] ensure the universality of the vision of the whole…[through a particular]
method…suitable for access to truth” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 45). Considering the
symcomposition of Legend, Watten suggests that “individual interests bound up in a group dynamic of radical
tendency…may move toward a horizon of either dissolution or redefinition” (Watten, “Secret History,” 597). By
this argument, moving beyond “the positing subject creates a space of negativity that may be identified as the
Utopian space of language...[and] an intersubjective horizon that is the realization of its form of multiauthorship
(ibid., 605).
349
coordination of experience.2127 Indeed, it is the re-orientation of margins and visual axes, the use of blank
space and construction of unusual visual and sonic patterns, which constitute the most significant visual,
and by analogy, conceptual hallmarks of such prose.2128 McHale repeatedly draws attention to Raymond
Federman‟s 1971 experimental novel, Double or Nothing, – and secondarily to selected works of such
other writers as William Gass, Michel Butor, Christine Brooke-Rose and Steve Katz.2129 Purposeful
experiments in concrete prose can be traced, however, at least to Sterne‟s Tristram Shandy – most
famously, its black page – which finds a recent equivalent in Dave Eggers‟ “There Are Some Things He
Should Keep to Himself” which consists, in its entirety, of five blank pages.2130 Noigrandes concretist,
Haroldo de Campos, increasingly turns his attention to concrete prose from his Galáxias onward,2131 and
Perloff draws attention to the experimental prose of Cage, Retallack, McCaffery and Waldrop as
comparable writers, and particularly to the “absurdist cataloguing” of Kenneth Goldsmith‟s immense No.
111.2.7.93-10.20.96,2132 a groundbreaking, concrete revision of the poietic knot within which linguistic
belonging is existentially charged.
b) The parameters of concretism
The suggestion regarding concretism is that the concrete entity presents the persistence of a particular
existential intensity at which poietic material – whether visual, sonic, linguistic or conceptual, separately
or together – coheres in a maximally self-referential manner, while presenting a minimal distance
between theory and praxis, form and content. Such concrete intensities are not restricted to any historical
epoch – at least not by any necessity – as they are determined by aesthetic rather than historical norms. If
they manifest with considerable force in the 1950s, it is because at this point the particular intensity of
concretism becomes self-conscious. Thus, without dismissing the coherence of the international
movement which emerged in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s,2133 it is no exaggeration to maintain that
2127
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 180-90.
See McHale, 183-4; Perloff, Concrete Prose, 141-2; Pegrum, Challenging Modernity, 268-9). We might also in
passing note the concrete concerns of much of the paracritical work of Ihab Hassan and some of the writers in
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
2129
Pegrum remarks that the techniques employed by some of these writers are fairly close to those of the Dadaists
and Futurists (ibid.).
2130
Dave Eggers, “There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself,” How We Are Hungry (London: Penguin,
2005), 201-5.
2131
See Perloff, “Concrete Prose,” 148-52.
2132
Kenneth Goldsmith, No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96, 20 November 2011
<http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/111/index.html>.
2133
See Scobie, Earthquakes, 145.
2128
350
a certain concrete logic undergirds the numerous historical explorations of aesthetic intermediation.
Furthermore, given the complexities which adhere to any such project of concrete intermediation, it is not
surprising that at its most minimal, such concretism is also at its most visible.
The present proposition is not that minimalism and concretism are identical, nor even that they are
necessarily complementary. Rather, it holds that at times their conceptual and material passages are
parallel – one clarifying the other – and, at others, that their trajectories intersect, effecting a poietically
productive perturbation and genuine novelty. The concrete emergence of novelty is seldom unrestrained,
however. Concretism reflects not only an aesthetic self-productivity, but also a theoretical selfreflexivity. The concrete object and poem – indeed, the concrete object-poem – constitute metatheoretical entities, but entities with minimal content that has a maximal effect. In this sense, concretism
constitutes an existential orientation rather than a movement, subject to a distributed history, gathering at
nodal moments but in essence unrestrained by these. That which is concrete of concretism is not its
medium, but the relation which persists between the medium and its message – a relation which is
rendered with particular clarity when this message is minimalist or self-reflexive.
c) Synaesthetic concrete patterning
We might call to mind the celebrated position of Marshall McLuhan, who views all media as an
“extension of some human faculty – psychic or physical”2134 and the sense in which the medium is the
message as emerging from the manner in which it “shapes and controls the scale and form of human
association and action.”2135 Certainly, this is a deeply concrete vision of intermediation, but it is one
which is equally anthropocentric. The quantitative ground for a particular medium is handed over almost
entirely to the qualitative distinctions of sensation and physical process. Thus, turning to Bohn‟s insight,
that concrete intermediation “is neither a compromise nor an evasion but a synthesis of principles
underlying each medium,”2136 we come to recognize that at the very moment of affirming that media are
extensions of the senses, we are drawn back to the recognition that as such a synthesis, these works are
equally drawn from theory and concept.
2134
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 26.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Abacus, 1964), 16.
2136
Ibid.
2135
351
In this light, the concrete object is a theoretical object precisely in the sense explored above: a singular
intersection of self-reflective theory and practice. With regard to a minimalist concretism, the McLuhanist
dogma that the medium is the message is nowhere more provocatively interrogated than in the so-called
colour poetry of Robert Lax. The experimental temper of this work is well-exhibited in the productive
tension which emerges from the relation of the various verbal, visual, linguistic and implicitly rhythmic
manifestations of its constituent media. We might fruitfully compare the verbal “Red & Blue,” which
appears in Bann‟s epochal anthology, to the predominantly visual “Another Red Red Blue Poem.” Both
present a remarkable series of synthetic permutations which result from the dialectic between the verbal
and visual spheres, generating more general questions regarding the relation of concretism and
intermediation.
Closely considering Lax‟s original typescript for “Red & Blue” (Figure 102),2137 reproduced in miniature
below, reveals the manner in which the temporal, rhythmic and intervallic material of this poem sets up a
productive counterpoint between its potential visual, conceptual, linguistic and sonic instantiations. Here
an oblique approach to quality crosses sheer quantity in a forceful examination of the concrete aesthetic:
2137
Robert Lax, Red & Blue, 1967. Facsimile of original manuscript.
352
353
Figure 102: Robert Lax, Red & Blue, 1967.
354
Only three words are used in this work: red and blue – opposites on the visual spectrum – and white,
which marks at once the absence of colour, as well as the potential for its taking-place. These are
“arrange[d as] individual syllables in slender columns”2138 containing eight repetitions each – parallel,
vertical bands2139 which “break[…] up the journey of the reading eye,”2140 but which constitute a rhythmic
regularity of their own, at once visual and sonic insofar as they encourage a certain pace of processing
and style of recitation. Lax was deeply concerned with the different types of rhythmic pattern which
emerged from his work,2141 treating sounds and words alike as “means of instantiating the pattern”2142 –
an “abstract entity”2143 with remarkably concrete properties insofar as these are determined in terms of
quantitative rather than qualitative intensities.2144
Yet for all these assertions, it is difficult to ignore that the poem possesses no directly chromatic qualities
as such. Colour manifests only to the extent that we are able to equate the concept of colour, the verbal
markers of colour, and the aesthetic associations these reiterations occasion, with colour in terms of its
qualitative actuality. Such equation poses significant existential questions: where does the actuality of
colour reside – in the quantitative dimension, or the physical part of the spectrum which a particular
colour occupies; in the somatic sequence prompted by the sensory apprehension of its particular
wavelength; in the idea of a particular colour; in the epistemological normalization of a particular colour
by a concept and its predicates?2145 It is of no small consequence that the interest provoked by this work
rests on indicators of the minimalist aesthetic: sparsity, austerity, severe reduction, repetition, incremental
subtraction, sudden inversion, a concern with scale and presence.2146 Nonetheless, its principal concern
with chromatic specificity cannot be reduced to an aesthetic position.
2138
Stephen Bann, “Concrete Poetry and the Recent Work of Robert Lax,” Voyages 2.1&2 (1968): 80.
On the significance of Lax‟s vertical style see Alexander, Minimalism, 185, 206.
2140
Bann, “Recent Work,” 80.
2141
Alexander, Minimalism, 207.
2142
Ibid.
2143
Ibid.
2144
On this point I disagree with Alexander‟s suggestion that such an abstract entity “cannot be said to exist in any
physical or concrete sense” (ibid.), the reasons for which disagreement I discuss above – in short, that concept is
material insofar as it relates to the materialism of thought, and also that concretism should be understood in
quantitative rather than qualitative terms.
2145
It is useful here to recall that idea and concept are complimentary with respect to the determination of belonging:
where an idea expresses the set or class to which an object belongs, without itself situating the object in this
belonging, the concept situates the object with respect to this set or class by indicating its properties or identity, but,
in turn, is incapable of directly expressing the set or class in question. See page 324 of the present work.
2146
Alexander (ibid., 185) and Bann (Bann, “Recent Work,” 81) take note of some of these stylistic tendencies.
2139
355
Determining chromatic specificity becomes a question precariously balanced between concept, matter and
effect, and as such, a rehearsal of ontological fundaments. Lax was content with admitting the primacy of
abstraction in his work,2147 but any such overly rigorous classification threatens to miss the implicit
distinction of colour as concrete taking-place, from colour as medium, and colour as exemplary ground
upon which the distinction of primary and secondary qualities rests – reviving the problem, so significant
to Descartes and Locke, which phenomenology imagined it had dismissed once and for all.2148 Implicit in
Alexander‟s assessment of Lax‟s colour poetry is the ascendency of secondary over primary quality,
citing as basis Lax‟s own preference for relation over essence – “it doesn‟t matter if red is not red…what
matter is red is not blue.”2149 Thus, Alexander believes that “it is the contrast between the elements that is
important. It is not what they represent, nor what [they] are in themselves that is important. Instead it is
the sheer difference between them that allows the poet to use them to suggest a pattern,”2150 and that it is
such patterning that ties Lax‟s poetry to the minimalist tradition,2151 reflecting the essence towards which
Lax‟s brand of concretism aspires.
On account of its verbal constitution, “Red and Blue” presents what we might call an unusual type of
negative presentation – colour is rendered present by virtue of the persistence of its absence. By contrast,
“Another Red Red Blue Poem” (Figure 103)2152 effects precisely the species of presence with which
minimalists are habitually concerned. Here the understanding of poem clearly presses beyond its
conventional written forms towards a more inclusive understanding of the force of poiesis or production.
Our ordinary understanding is that “the word, or at least a part of the word, is the minimal unity of
poetry.…[but here] the poem is reduced to its essence as pattern.”2153 Although a strikingly austere visual
work, there is little question that familiarity with Lax‟s concerns, methods and presentation enhances our
comprehension of this work qua poem. 2154
2147
See Alexander, Minimalism, 196, 205-6, 219.
AF, 2. “By „primary qualities,‟ one understands properties which are supposed to be inseparable from the
object...properties of the in-itself,” (ibid., 2-3) while secondary qualities pertain to “sensible qualities which are not
in the things themselves but in my subjective relation to the latter” (ibid,. 2).
2149
Robert Lax, “A Red and Blue Notebook,” 4-8 October 1972, Lax Papers, Columbia University, qtd. In
Alexander, Minimalism, 213. This considered, we might look to the example of “Red Circle Blue Square” (Robert
Lax, Red Circle Blue Square (New York: Journeyman, 1971) in which the word “red” is printed in red ink, “blue” in
blue ink, adding a concrete if somewhat predictable self-reflexivity to the work.
2150
Alexander, Minimalism, 213.
2151
Ibid.
2152
Robert Lax, Another Red Red Blue Poem (New York: Journeyman, 1971).
2153
Alexander, Minimalism, 218.
2154
Ibid.
2148
356
Figure 103: Robert Lax, Another Red Red Blue Poem (1971).
Although its principal means of presentation are undoubtedly visual, having been told that this is a poem,
we are implicitly enjoined to explore the linguistic elements for which these blocks and columns of colour
are presumably metonyms, substituting for their verbal equivalents – blue and red; equivalents of their
potential articulation as words, as sounds. Thus we might imagine a verbal poem, most likely constructed
in vertical columns, from left to right, arranged in three groups – the first of five columns, the second of
four, the third of four; and alternating between groups of three, four and seven blocks. 2155 Doubtless these
groupings are of symbolic as well as quantitative value. As Bann notes, for Lax there exists “an intimate
relationship between simple devices such as inversion and repetition…and the spiritual or philosophical
burden of the poem,” 2156and Mark van Doren describes Lax‟s poetry as a patient transcription of “a sort
of bliss he could do nothing about[, l]east of all…express it,”2157 and there are certainly significances tied
to the numbers three, four and seven in Judeo-Christian mythology. Nonetheless, it seems wrong to
overdetermine such molecular content, particularly when this work also clearly instantiates a powerful
holism. Printed on a single sheet, the work is also a unit, the effect of which derives from the visuoconceptual vibration of its parts qua the whole, in addition to the processes by which these might be
viewed or read as additive or subtractive components.
2155
Ibid.
Bann, “Recent Work,” 81.
2157
Mark Van Doren, “Mark Van Doren on Robert Lax,” Voyages, 62 (62-4).
2156
357
While to read the poem in a conventional sense might suggest that we process these units in terms of
vertical rows arranged from top to bottom, rows which are then organized into three larger blocks which
proceed from left to right, the overall lisibility of the work suggests several other strategies. It is possible,
of course, to reverse or invert the direction in which the units, reading from top to bottom, or right to left
– indeed, several more complicated patterns might plausibly be woven through this text. The substance of
such patterning is distributed between the pattern itself and at least three other types of entity which we
might substitute for the chromatic constituents of the poem: verbal entities, in other words red and blue ;
numerical entities, in which case “1 2 3/ 1 2 3/ 1 2 3 4/ 1 2 3” acts as the purely quantitative equivalent of
the left column; and sonic entities, if we understand that the poem as a type of score to be read aloud,
sounding out the colours in question, and determining their pace and rhythms by their proximity and
various gaps. The poem presents the verbivocovisual complex of concretism in particularly minimal terms
– at once unified and immanent, while simultaneously the paradigm for a patterned, rhythmic
extemporation of poietic taking-place. Concrete minimalism allows us to glimpse the atopia upon which
poietic generation, effect, reflection and belonging are coincident: it is the example of its own poietic
exemplarity.
d) Quantitative categories and the role of the example
Exemplarity presents the primary vehicle through which the interaction of theory and praxis, the basis for
any poetics, is comprehended. Since exemplarity is furthermore intimately connected to the Real – the
principal concern of both minimalism and concretism – it is necessary to examine which of the dominant
models of exemplarity is best able to account for this remarkable intensification of an entity‟s
knowability. Recalling that for the present argument it is quantity that lies at the heart of all Being, our
initial contention is that inasmuch as exemplarity intensifies the knowability of an existent or entity, it
also coordinates to some degree the quantitative categories by which it is possible to comprehend such
entities. Extending the binarism of Aristotelian categorical thought,2158 which asserts as its proper sphere
the most elementary structures which organize those things which exist,2159 Kant claims that the
categories are coordinate rather than subordinate to one another.2160 Coordination establishes nonhierarchical relationships between any of the terms of Kant‟s categories of judgment – quantity, quality,
2158
For example, the Aristotelian opposition of particular and universal is, in Kant‟s categories, mediated by the
singular.
2159
See Shields, Aristotle, 147-8.
2160
Kant, Pure Reason, 137.
358
relation and modality – allowing for the understanding that these are potentially co-implicit with respect
to a particular entity or object.
As Ferrara notes, Kant‟s strategy in this respect involves two distinct routes – “„subsuming under a
concept‟ and „bringing to a concept.‟”2161 Both refer to the coordination of quantity – of particularity,
singularity and universality2162 – the first, the descent from universals to particulars asserts the
universality of the transcendental a priori aspect of pure concepts which precede as the essential
conditions for the instantiation of concepts by particulars; the second, the ascent from particulars to
universals, maintains that by virtue of aesthetic judgment, it is possible from the properties of a
particularity to determine its position with respect to a pure concept. The Kantian addition of singularity
as a separate category of quantity is significant in negotiating these two positions. He accepts the position
from Aristotelian logic that the singular is a type of universal in which “the predicate of a singular
judgment holds for the subject concept without exception.”2163 Singularity involves universality insofar as
it constitutes a self-referential unity: it is universal in every instantiation of its singularity, but this
singularity cannot simply be extended or applied as a concept outside of itself. Simultaneously, as
Attridge notes, singularity indicates the emergent properties of an entity: while identifying it as a
“particular manifestation of general rules…[and] a peculiar nexus…perceived as resisting or exceeding all
pre-existing general determinations,”2164 singularity retains a sense of mutability, of being “eminently
imitable,”2165 and an “event…which takes place in reception”2166
The apparent incommensurability of these views is easily overstated, for do we not finally discover
mirrored in the opposition of emergent and self-reflexive singularity, precisely the essential division of
Kantian reflective judgment between teleological and aesthetic judgment? The former understanding of
singularity corresponds to the notion that aesthetic experience has a purposiveness, a teleology not always
pronounced, but which nonetheless may be presupposed. The latter presents the possibility that
singularity is instantiated by self-prescriptive and auto-teleological entities. Both, finally, appear to
conform to the Kantian understanding of singularity as the means of mediating between particularity and
2161
Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York:
Columbia UP, 2008), 53. See ibid., 19.
2162
In categorical terms particularity, singularity and universality are, respectively, plurality, allness (totality) and
unity (see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 124-5,
132-8.
2163
Kant, Pure Reason, 124.
2164
Attridge, Singularity, 63.
2165
Ibid.
2166
Ibid., 64.
359
universality, constituting objects in search of a theory, or, in more properly Kantian terms, an ascent from
particularity to universality.2167 Kant famously identifies at the heart of reflective judgment a free play of
the imagination and understanding,2168 and the sense of this claim is captured well in Ferrara‟s description
of the “mutual feedback”2169 between the faculty of imagination, which constitutes representations of
sensory data, and the faculty of understanding, seeking concepts to regulate these representations. Most
significantly, however, this “mutual feedback…instead of being brought to closure by the intellect
through the production of a definitive concept, remains unamenable to closure and indefinitely active.”2170
To understand this peculiar power of singularity, apparently instantiated with particular intensity in the
case of aesthetic objects, it is necessary to recognize its singular energy as nothing other than the force of
exemplarity. Of central concern in this respect is the manner in which certain aesthetic judgments – of
taste, for example – adjure “universal assent”2171 and universal communicability “without mediation by a
concept.”2172 It is such immediacy to which exemplarity attends. For Kant, the example is a species of
hypotyposis – an exhibition “making [a concept] sensible”2173 or open to sensory intuition. “[I]f concepts
are empirical, the intuitions are called examples. If they are pure concepts of the understanding, the
intuitions are called schemata.”2174 Such hypotyposis is evidently vital in connecting objects of intuition to
concepts, connections which furnish judgment with direction and force. Ferrara cautions as to the overconflation of schemata with symbolic hypotyposis, or exemplarity, since “to treat...[examples] as the same
as schemata means to betray their exemplary nature, to turn the process of „merely‟ reflective judgment
into one that eventually leads to the closure of determinant judgment.” 2175 If “schemata contain
2167
Kant extends to singularity its “own special place in the category of judgments” (Georges Dicker, Kant’s Theory
of Knowledge: An Analytic Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 54), which affirms that “allness (totality),” the
category that correlates with the singular judgment, “is nothing but plurality considered as unity” (Kant, Pure
Reason, 136). To the extent that unity – universality from the transcendental perspective – runs up against the finite
in any attempted relation to infinity, so singularity is limited by its actual implementation as a relation to the
universal. As Robert Hanna reminds us, “all concepts are by their nature universal or general, it is only in their use
that they have a singular interpretation” (Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2004), 208), in which case the gap between singular and universal, unity and infinity (allness), is one
that emerges through practical deployment of concepts in relation to objects. What makes these quantities associable
in terms of logical extension, which ties to the infinite dimension of thought, does not carry seamlessly into applied
(epistemological) knowledge, which requires unity or wholeness.
2168
Kant, Judgment, 61-2.
2169
Ferrara, Force, 27.
2170
Ibid.
2171
Kant, Judgment, 104.
2172
Ibid., 162.
2173
Ibid., 226.
2174
Ibid., 225-6.
2175
Ferrara, Force, 51. Such determinant judgment refers to strict equivalence determined by rules, principles or
laws.
360
direct…exhibitions of the concept,”2176 it is because they subsume entities under a concept, to recall the
argument above. In contrast, “exemplary validity is best understood in terms of creating an example
rather than applying an example,”2177 and in this creative action, exemplarity brings its activity to a
concept. In this light, exemplarity might be described as a special type of validation in which the example,
as singularity, demands universal assent, effecting a reconciliation between particularity and universality.
It is this reconciliation which validates the commonplace that a given example is potentially applicable in
every situation within which it is exemplary.
Unresolved in the Kantian discourse is that the example remains curiously dislocated from the force of
exemplarity itself, in which case it might be argued that it is really just a particularly convincing
illustration of a concept, and not itself an instantiating force. From the perspective of aesthetic judgment,
exemplary force involves mapping the relation between example as entity and those things which the
example enhances. Typically we encounter “the capacity possessed by the exemplary work of art to
induce an aesthetic experience beyond the bounds of its context or origin without relying on external
principles or laws.”2178 Kant identifies this force with “analogy…in which judgment performs a double
function: it applies the concept to the object of sensible intuition; and then it applies the mere rule by
which it reflects on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the former object is only the
symbol.”2179 Exemplarity, for Kant, is not a force in itself. Rather, it is a type of “indirect exhibition,”2180 a
shared reference that takes place as an increased resonance with “the rules by which we reflect on the two
[proximate entities in the operation of an example] and on how they operate.”2181 Such analogical force is
inextricably linked to the Kantian notion of sensus communis and universal assent. In this light, the
example can be seen as the embodiment of a process which formulates contingent, non-conceptual rules
for the perception and connection of specific entities. Implicit here is that the force of the example is
transitory and impermanent. We might even argue that herein lies the appeal of exemplarity: it produces
temporary intensifications of experience which remain open and do not require final commitment or
universalization under a transcendental principle, yet which are universal enough to be agreed upon.
Accepting the Kantian position, it is possible to adopt relatively uncritically Ferrara‟s traditionalist claim,
that “[e]xamples orient us in our appraisal of the meaning of action not as schemata, but as well-formed
2176
Kant, Judgment, 227.
Ferrara, Force, 53
2178
Ibid., 39; 61.
2179
Kant, Judgment, 227.
2180
Ibid.
2181
Ibid.
2177
361
works of art do: namely, as outstanding instances of congruence capable of educating our discernment by
way of exposing us to selective instances of the feeling of the furtherance of our life.” 2182 If Ferrara‟s
proposition retains many merits of the Kantian project, it also fails to recognize that its conception of
norms is itself disappointingly normative. It has been suggested that exemplarity is threatened when the
example is handed over entirely to the universal. This is not to miss or subvert the Kantian argument that
an example presents, through the force of an analogy, the mediation of particular and universal. What
requires emphasis, however, is that it is nothing other than the Kantian association of exemplarity with
singularity – that the example is singular rather than particular or universal – which makes it subject to the
type of coordination which, to my mind, always seems to reinvest the universal, at however subtle a level.
Similarly, the Kantian identification of exemplary validity with analogy remains equally problematic, for
it is far from certain that analogical connectivity is sufficiently strong to justify the faith Kant and many
other thinkers place in it. Analogy doubtless provokes novel connections between entities and plays a
significant role in facilitating communication. This does not, however, make it equal to the task of
universal validation which genuine exemplarity claims for itself. Displacing exemplary force from the
relation between the exemplifying entity and the exemplified entity to the level of a vague analogical
force of shared principles or rules, is problematic precisely in its vagueness.
e) The example is para-ontological rather than para-epistemological
Turning to the work of Agamben, we discover a voice of startling insight on the force of the example. 2183
For Agamben, the example and exception constitute a symmetrical system2184 in which inclusion or
exclusion – conditions of belonging which ordinarily reflect a position coordinate to, but not co-extensive
with, Being – autopoietically constitute their own ontology.2185 Although structurally defined by negation
– “whereas the exception is included through its exclusion, the example is excluded through exhibition of
2182
Ferrara, Force, 61.
Paraphrases of Agamben‟s argument refer to two different versions of What is a Paradigm? The earlier is a
lecture offered at the EGS (Agamben, What is a Paradigm?); the more recent is the first part of The Signature of All
Things.
2184
HS, 21; Agamben, Signature, 24.
2185
Although ontologically distinct, Agamben suggests that the “exception and example are correlative concepts that
are ultimately indistinguishable and that come into play every time the very sense of the belonging and commonality
of individuals is to be defined” (HS, 22).
2183
362
its inclusion”2186 – the consequences of this system are unambiguously existentially positive: in short, the
recognition of the situation in which seeming is Being.2187
Following Aristotle, Agamben recognizes not only that which is exemplified as being rendered
increasingly intelligible by the example, but also that the example itself, by its means of relation, is that
which is more knowable. An idiosyncratic amplification emerges: because it is more knowable, by
containing in itself an “excess of knowability,”2188 the example renders something else, to which it is
related, more knowable. The Kantian analogical explanation suggests that such amplified knowability
occurs as the result of a shared appeal to rules of belonging or genus. Agamben, however, maintains that
“[t]he important thing is not that the two are homogeneous but precisely that one is more knowable”2189 –
a question of existential “intensities.”2190 It remains to be explained, however, why and how the example
– or paradigm2191 – is more knowable. Discovering in Plato an alternative explanation to the categorical
view which passes from Aristotle to Kant, Agamben suggests that the effective force of the example
arises from the fact that “the [exemplary…] relationship takes place between the single phenomenon and
its intelligibility. The [example…] is a singularity considered in the medium of its knowability. What
makes something intelligible is the paradigmatic exhibition of its own knowability.”2192 Paraphrased
elsewhere, the example is a “singular case that is isolated from its context, only insofar as, by exhibiting
its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.”2193
The radical move here is the refusal of any a priori universal or substrate.2194 Hence Agamben is able to
claim that the example cannot be comprehended by the manner in which singularity mediates between
particular and universal, but “entails a movement that goes from singularity to singularity, and, without
ever leaving singularity, transforms every singular case into an exemplar of a general rule that can never
be stated a priori.”2195 The exemplary validity of the example does not precede it as knowability, nor does
it function, as Kant might have it, through some form of judgment, since the latter, no matter how subtle,
appears always to reaffirm the primacy of the concept. In the medium of its knowability, that the example
2186
Agamben, Signature, 24.
Ibid., 32; See Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,”
Potentialities, 174 (160-74).
2188
Agamben, Paradigm. See Agamben, Signature, 19.
2189
Agamben, Paradigm.
2190
Agamben, Signature, 20.
2191
It should be noted that, for Agamben, paradigmicity and exemplarity approximate one another (ibid., 11, 18).
2192
Agamben, Paradigm.
2193
Agamben, Signature, 18.
2194
Ibid., 21-2, 26, 30-1.
2195
Ibid., 22. See ibid., 19.
2187
363
is self-reflexive affirms not its identity in its normal medium of presentation, but in the medium of its
knowability. This is a distinctly minimalist proposition, not entirely inhospitable to the scholastic notion
of haecceity, and would certainly support the intuition that minimalist works as various as La Monte
Young‟s drone work, Dan Flavin‟s light art and Robert Lax‟s poetry do indeed establish their own
aesthetic paradigms. Accepting thus that the exemplary entity self-reflexively defines its own singularity
in its very taking-place,2196 it becomes clear that Attridge‟s contention – that aesthetic “[s]ingularity is not
the same as autonomy, particularity, identity, contingency, or specificity; nor is it to be equated with
„uniqueness‟”2197 – holds not only from the perspective of judgment, but also from that of the entity or
artwork itself.
The resultant situation presents a shift from an epistemological view of knowability to an essentially
ontological one2198 – a para-ontology, which “refers not to the cognitive relation between subject and
object but to being,” constituting “an ontology which is still to be thought”2199 as that which partakes of
Being but is beside Being. Significant resonances emerge between this para-ontological position and that
which Meillassoux indicates in the arche-fossil as an absolute, external to the correlation of subject and
object. Indeed, if in minimalism we discover an exemplary para-ontology, it is because the concrete
quantities which constitute its aesthetic press so persistently against the boundaries of the absolute.
Finally, to understand what it means to exemplify the Real – a significant clause of the present thesis – it
is necessary to distinguish between the para-epistemic and para-ontological models of what it means for
the example to be more knowable. According to Gasché, “[w]here cognition fails, aesthetic judgment
ensures a minimal mastery and minimal identification of something for which no determined
concepts...are at hand.”2200 In this sense, “aesthetic judgment holds its place as equal to cognition. This
para-epistemic dimension of judgments of taste is the hallmark of Kant‟s aesthetics.”2201 Most models of
exemplarity constitute such a para-epistemology: a sphere of knowability, initially minimal, which
radiates between a concept and its intuition by which an example establishes an increase in knowability
qua knowability – an increase which, through self-reflection, reopens that which otherwise would be
epistemically closed, and situates itself thus as the knowability beside regular intelligibility.
2196
In passing, it is worth noting that there are significant similarities between that which Agamben intends by
taking-place and Attridge‟s understanding of singularity in terms of an event (Attridge, Singularity, 64).
2197
Ibid.
2198
Agamben, Signature, 32.
2199
Agamben, “Paradigm.”
2200
Gasché, Idea of Form, 4.
2201
Ibid.
364
However, the actual existential intensity of the example cannot be contained either in epistemic or paraepistemic terms, for these leave unattended the properly ontological dimension of exemplarity. In the first
instance, we might understand para-ontology as the recognition that if the example is to exceed its
reduction to epistemological terms, it must be shown to be a force independent of judgment. For
Agamben, the exception and the example – the principal terms of his understanding para-ontology –
involve both an essential suspension of judgment and a constitutive undecidability: the example is
“whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself…and thus rejects all identity and every
condition of belonging.”2202 Moving decisively beyond any conception of sensus communis, Agamben
suggests that the example “come[s] into play every time the very sense of the belonging and commonality
of...[particularities] is to be defined.”2203 The example “escapes the antinomy of the universal and the
particular,”2204 constituting instead a “force field traversed by polar tensions”2205 – a threshold upon which
belonging can be indicated by self-reflexivity alone. Exemplarity emerges as a special function of
affirmatory auto-exclusion: “[neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that
presents itself as such, that shows its singularity. Hence the pregnancy of the Greek term…para-deigma,
that which is shown alongside.”2206 In short, “intelligibility does not precede the phenomenon; it stands,
so to speak „beside‟ it (para).”2207 Agamben is able to assert in this light that “the example steps out of its
class in the very moment in which it delimits it…The example is thus excluded from the normal case not
because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it.”2208 The
para-ontological force evades both particular and universal through its being simultaneously an autoreflexive, autopoietic and auto-demonstrative operation – the “innermost exteriority”2209 of every
exemplary entity which assures its singularity. Para-ontology is like a halo2210 which “dwells beside the
thing…so close that it almost merges with it,”2211 a “supplement added to perfection – something like the
vibration of that which is perfect, the glow at its edges.”2212
2202
CC, 87.
HS, 22.
2204
CC, 9.
2205
Agamben, Signature, 20.
2206
CC, 10. See Agamben, Signature, 27.
2207
Ibid.
2208
HS, 22.
2209
CC., 15. To recall, this is the term which Agamben employs to characterize the ontological process of takingplace.
2210
Agamben develops this concept from Benjamin‟s of aura (see Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 44-6).
2211
CC, 101.
2212
Ibid., 55.
2203
365
Agamben‟s is an account as evocative as it is compelling, yet his theory of exemplarity does not articulate
satisfactorily such exemplary force itself. Certainly Agamben demonstrates an ample awareness that this
force exists, and that it necessarily emerges from the example itself: he considers it variously a force of
transformative modelling,2213 a force of belonging,2214 a force of intelligibility,2215 a force of analogy, 2216
and a force of differing intensities.2217 This, however, is to define a force by what it does, and by that
which it draws together, which is not the same thing as confronting the force itself. Nor do we approach a
satisfactory argument be endorsing the para-ontological maxim that seeming is Being,2218 which certainly
rests on the existence of a productive exemplary force, but does not directly describe it. The present
suggestion is that to understand this force of exemplarity we must progress from the view that the
example is simply self-reflexive, to one in which this self-reflexivity is directed towards autopoiesis and
self-demonstration, thus establishing the example as universal insofar as its validity extends to every
situation in which it is able to establish its own belonging. It is somewhat disappointing in this light that
Agamben ultimately affirms that the example “is strictly linked to the problem of analogy.” 2219 In my
view, the connective force of analogy remains intrinsically open-ended, allowing numerous and rapid
superficial connections to be established. In one sense these are its strengths, making analogy the most
pervasive mode of connectivity.2220 However, from the perspective of an autopoietic para-ontology, a
reliance on analogical examples seems always to invite external intervention – some form of reflective
judgment – in which case para-ontology cannot guard itself against the possibility that it may revert to a
para-epistemological understanding of the example. In such a situation, the essential force of the example
remains unexpressed, and Agamben‟s reliance on analogy culminates in the familiar tactic of substituting
exhibition for explanation,2221 according to which it is unnecessary to describe the force of the example;
we can simply demonstrate it.2222
2213
Agamben, Signature, 11, 21-3.
Ibid., 17, 24, 29-30.
2215
Ibid., 19, 22-4, 26-8, 30.
2216
Ibid., 18, 20.
2217
Ibid., 20.
2218
Ibid., 32.
2219
Agamben, “Paradigm.”
2220
Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time , trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995), 66.
2221
On this point, Agamben‟s brief but potent exposition of the term thus as mark of demonstration qua Being is
instructive (CC, 103).
2222
Of the example‟s self-productive aspect, discussing Goethe‟s proposition of Urphänomen, Agamben writes that
“insofar as they are paradigms, „they are the theory‟” (Agamben, Signature, 30).
2214
366
f) Exemplary force
Although it is now clearer that the force of the example resides in its para-ontological operation, and that
this force is knowable by the self-reflexive operation of exclusion by virtue of self-inclusion – hence the
example stands apart qua its exemplarity – the actual force of the example remains to be defined qua
force. A possible solution is discovered in shifting our attention from analogy to homology, from seeming
or likeness to structural correspondence. Through homological coherence, the compossibility of
autopoiesis, auto-reflexivity and auto-demonstration is conceivably actualized. Homology is perhaps best
understood in terms of isomorphism, the discovery of a shared deep structure or structural forces between
like or unlike elements.2223 Indeed, we do well to recall that the Noigrandes poets insisted upon
isomorphism as the defining mark of exemplary concretism.
While homology is acknowledged as offering a “valuable model[…of] formal correspondence founded in
reality,”2224 restricting their operation to an essentially logical character, the present discussion recognizes
in isomorphism a properly ontological force. Exemplarity is thus intimately related to the structures and
structuration of the Real. The example functions not because it is isomorphic and homologous to the
Real, but rather because it reveals that isomorphism is the very force of ontological structuration itself – a
force which is Real. Exemplarity names an operation of independent structuring of the Real which,
ordinarily unintelligible except in retrospect, is knowable through a specific structured, exemplary entity.
As opposed to an analogical model of exemplarity, homology or isomorphism cannot simply be deduced.
It must realize itself, or rather, expose itself as Real. The Real emerges not by any dramatic gesture of
affirmation, however, as it is in fact the persistence of the Real which makes epistemic affirmation
possible in the first place. Although the Real is not a metaphysical ground as such, it functions
homologously since it remains indifferent to questions of origin and telos, even as it shapes the manner in
which they are phrased. The Real, finally, is a synonym for ontological naturalism.
If, as Badiou suggests, pure Being qua multiplicity is unstructured, it becomes necessary to suppose that
some process of contingent structuring takes place beside such multiplicity in order for entities to exist
concurrently in Being through a process of structuration. Such is the function of metastructure, which
structures ontological structure itself, insofar as the latter fails with regard to pure multiplicity. Indeed, we
might say that it is an isomorphic force of structuration which connects all Real entities or existents, and
2223
For a discussion of some of the general principle of isomorphism, see Bartelanffy, General Systems Theory, 36-
7.
2224
Ibid., 85.
367
which renders them knowable in terms of the very medium of their knowability, which is to say, structure.
If isomorphism marks the structuring force of the Real, as well as the force of the example, it follows that
these are in a significant sense co-extensive. Such force finally speaks of the physicality of metaphysics,
in which light I find it difficult to imagine that any force exists which is not, finally, identical to the very
fundamental force which allows existence to cohere and to persist.2225 The example is an aperture to the
Real which operates as, and through, an isomorphic para-ontology. The proximity of this assertion to the
thesis of the present work – that minimalism exemplifies the facticity of the Real – is clearly discernible.
Indeed, it draws together the productive knot of exemplarity, persistence, minimalism and the Real in a
provocative manner. It remains only to identify this knot at its most concrete.
g) Concretism as minimalist para-ontology
I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking
voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the
room reinforce themselves, so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is
destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech.
I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out
any irregularities my speech might have.2226
This text constitutes the basic material of Alvin Lucier‟s legendary work of autopoietic concretism, I Am
Sitting in a Room (Track 47).2227 Self-productive, self-reflexive and self-regulatory, the work draws
together linguistic, sonic, and spatial media in a sound-sculpture which, subjected to a specific process –
technologically mediated, reproduced, exposed to certain physical laws and properties of spatial limitation
– is eventually entirely transformed, as are the media from which it takes its form. There may be no finer
example of the two principal quantitative operators of minimalism, drone or sustenance and repetition.2228
LaBelle summarizes the aesthetic process: “sound sets into relief the properties of a given space, its
materiality and characteristics, through reverberation and reflection, and, in turn, these characteristics
affect the given sound and how it is heard.”2229 As in any transformation, the moment we pay sufficient
attention to the transformative process to slow it down or arrest its strictly processual operation, we are
2225
Across history, numerous attempts have been made to delimit this force in terms of the elements, gravity,
electricity, atomic and subatomic forces, and even in terms of antimatter.
2226
Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room, libretto, 20 November 2011, <http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html>.
2227
Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room. Lovely Music, 1990.
2228
See Strickland, Minimalism, 281.
2229
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London and New York: Continuum, 2008),
123.
368
compelled to take note of a deep paradox: that it is considerably more difficult than one might expect to
distinguish between poiesis and destruction; making and unmaking.2230
The work is indubitably autopoietic: the composer literally performs his own dictates. Sitting in a
resonant room, he records his voice which he plays back into the room, recapturing it with additional
resonance – a process which is repeated relentlessly over forty-five minutes. Resonance comes to
dominate to the extent that language gives way to noise, the effects of which are at times quite unsettling.
That the remnants of pitch and of rhythm remain, despite the significant processual decomposition of
Lucier‟s work, owes to the clear non-fluency of Lucier‟s speech2231 which adds both pattern and
irregularity. As the initial repetitions progress, they also effect a sonic deepening, the extended s taking on
a whistle and the non-fluent r retaining a syncopated irregularity. To the attentive listener the initial
strengthening instantiated by repetition soon gives way to an increasingly complex interaction of
resonance and interference as the accentuated treble and bass tones begin to pull further apart, distinctly
undermining the integrity of the voice. Simultaneously, a deep pitch, the beginnings of a drone, emerges
from the deep, sustained pitch of the dipthong [a ]. Yet, as the duration of its disembodiment increases, so
the voice becomes hard, metallic – an uncanny mechanistic double; a voice increasingly divorced from
any sense of integrity as self-presence becomes an entirely mediated quality. Bass tones are almost
completely eroded by the exponentially increasing resonance, replaced by an irregular pitch which lags
significantly behind its articulation, while the s sounds give way to a constant atmospheric whistle,
punctuated by shrill, aggressive chirps.
However, what initially appears a purely destructive process begins to effect a significant reconstitution.
The atmospheric ground becomes more stable and upon it the whistle, itself more substantial now, reveals
a rhythmic play between two pitches. As the composition moves towards its conclusion, we are not
submerged in pure noise or chaos, but, rather, exposed to new singularities. Here is a compelling example
of minimalist transumption: extremely limited material, subjected to characteristically minimalist
aesthetic processes,2232 transposed to an atopian locus – that is, one which cannot be localized in an
ordinary sense, nor to a specific medium – from which is poietically subtracted a work which nonetheless
2230
Schlegel‟s fragments provide considerable insight in this regard. The majority of autopoietic gestures, even
thoroughly poietic gestures, rapidly consume themselves, dissipating generative energy by their incapacity for
adaptive self-monitoring. Their desire to be “entirely isolated...[and] complete,” (Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum
Fragment 206,” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J.M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 251)
results, for the fragment, in the paradoxical situation of autopoietic poiesis as “the point…continuously fluctuating
between self-creation and self-destruction” (Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragment 51, German Aesthetics, 247).
2231
LaBelle, Background Noise, 126.
2232
Strickland describes this as a “Minimal process-piece” (Strickland, Minimalism, 281).
369
evidences a singular concretism, an unambiguously poietic quantity. The semantic material of the work
self-reflexively distributes its poietic substance in a manner which undermines its coherence only to
transpose and affirm its persistence at another. Between text, voice, architecture, music and sound
sculpture – a situation literally amplified by its technological mediation – the poietic heart of the work is
predicated transumptively, within the para-ontological atopia which the autopoietic force of the example
instantiates in its very taking-place.
I phrase this subtractive autopoiesis in the sense Badiou reserves for the former of the terms, since while
it contains a negation, this negation does not exhaust or destroy the generative multiplicity that inheres in
the work: transformation and manifestation are simultaneous – the voice becomes noise, but noise
becomes a new entity, a new type of rhythm and melody. In the poetic alternation between creativity and
destruction, the singular importance of subtractive autopoiesis lies in that it transposes the self-regulatory
subject entirely into process, while still acknowledging the intrinsic excess which inhabits the process of
subtraction. It is thus weighted, ultimately, towards poiesis or generation.
In certain situations, it appears that the self-reflexive force of the example is so great as to become fully
autopoietic – in knowing itself as example, it produces itself as example. This autopoiesis subsequently
manifests a singular internal subtraction, an ontological torsion so that even as the example affirms itself
qua example,2233 it manifests beside itself a para-ontology. Thus, the example is autopoietic in a manner
which involves negation of its independence and the subtraction through this negation of a new, paraontological field which renders it not only knowable as such, but as a force of knowability. This
autopoietic operation – reflection, negation, extension, concrete novelty – seems to me remarkably close
to the process identified above in relation to Lucier‟s work as subtractive autopoiesis. In this sense I
suggest symmetry might be noted: subtractive autopoiesis instantiates an example of exemplarity, and
exemplarity functions by a logic of subtractive autopoiesis. If exemplarity is, as Agamben suggests, an
“ontology still to be thought,”2234 I contend that it might well be in this properly minimalist field that such
thinking potentially takes place.
2233
In this situation of meta-exemplarity, is the specific force of the meta not that of structuration itself, in which a
torsion between self-determined belonging and the concreteness of an entity‟s knowability produces exemplarity as
Being.
2234
Agamben, What is a Paradigm?
370
15. A TYPOLOGY OF MINIMALISM
a) Transumption and the typology of minimalism
The attempt to grasp and communicate the very essence of poiesis is the abiding concern of minimalism –
a claim which has been argued repeatedly in the present work, and which is evidenced beyond the
particularities of medium, aesthetic quality and historical epoch. Minimalism approximates poiesis by
affirming the essentially quantitative nature of Being. However, pure quantity – multiplicity – proves
elusive, in light of which the minimalist object is obliged to press its quantitative concerns only obliquely:
by the essentialization of quality, by the radicalization of the form and so, too, the sense of presence
conveyed by the work, and by the self-reflexive pursuit of the force by which such presence is knowable.
We term this last force exemplarity, which, manifesting a para-ontological field to entity, displaces the
question of a work‟s poietic essence to an atopia. An atopia is a non-space, the formulation of which is
necessitated by two recognitions. The first is that since the entirety of an entity resists representation
within the field of knowledge – which assigns epistemic values to ontological properties – it is necessary
to posit a subsidiary topos to account for those elements which escape the Count. As a field of
knowability such a topos mediates between Being – with which it is non-identical – and knowledge – to
which it cannot be reduced – manifesting a para-ontology which radiates from the heart of an entity
towards its normalization by concepts. At once reflective and productive, we term this force of the
example poietic, even though its domain is not pure poiesis. Hence our contention that an exemplary
para-ontology is locatable only in terms of a poietic atopia.
A good example of minimalism exemplifies well the quantitative force of Being by offering paraontological testimony to the taking-place of the Real. The minimalist entity is transumed2235 –
“transferred from one part or place to another,”2236 as Bann suggests; the materially2237 marked correlate
of the paradigmatic movement which Agamben recognizes is one from singularity to singularity, rather
2235
It is important to distinguish transumption from what Danto intends by transfiguration. Both involve the
transposition of aesthetic concerns to an atopian locus, and a consequent transformation of the significance of the
aesthetic object itself. The implications of this atopia are, however, notably different: transfiguration marks the
transformation of non-art to art, whereas transumption involves the clarification of mediality, place and taking-place
in art; transfiguration emphasizes a self-reflexive quasi-transcendence, while transumption involves a field of
immanence from which novelty is drawn by the sheer indifference of the objects to its status as art or non-art.
2236
Bann, Transumption, 7.
2237
To recall, material has been used in a broader sense throughout the present study.
371
than between universals and particulars2238 – from its quantitative location to that of its poietic takingplace. That this transumption is effected by a force which is unambiguously Real allows us to recognize
in exemplary entities the reflection of poietic force in the example, and of exemplary force in the poietic
entity, in both cases affirming the facticity and persistence of the taking-place of quantity. It is in this
respect that minimalism constitutes a radical field of potentiality with regard to the exemplification of the
Real. Finally, accepting these theses, which have consistently been argued and exemplified throughout the
present work, it is possible to offer, in conclusion, a typology of minimalism.
The first part of this work demonstrated that aggregating minimalism to particular properties, and
organizing these in terms of a stable movement, Minimalism, fails to account for its dynamic takingplace. Minimalism is neither a spent force, nor one with an orthodox beginning, and to grasp it
adequately, it is necessary to attend to its existential logic – its manner of existing or taking-place within
the Real. The existential logic of minimalism – the intuition of “the formal set of relations”2239 by which
minimalist entities manifest in existence – is transumptive, and such transumption is expressed by three
principal types or modalities: containment, distension and distribution.
b) The minimalist logic of containment
The majority of minimalism, whether by design or not, expresses itself as a species of the aesthetic
modality here termed containment. In the case of minimalist containment, the parameters of the work are
defined by various notions of monadism, restriction, unification, containment, poietic action within
specified limits, or the disintegration of such limits from within a situation which nonetheless appears
severely limited. In short, the forces of production and perception converge upon a contained work, and it
is through this very containment, and their temporary impotence with respect to such containment, that
such minimalist works effect the transumption, or atopian predication, which marks minimalism qua
force. Key minimalist sculptors offer useful terms in this regard: Judd‟s specific objects, Morris‟ unitary
forms, and Flavin‟s primary figures2240 all offer monadic conceptions of minimalist containment.
2238
Agamben, Signature, 19, 31.
Badiou, SMP, 31.
2240
Here we refer to the artist‟s self-assessment regarding his earlier and more austere work, since, as will be argued,
the majority of Flavin‟s work is, in fact, subject to a distributive logic.
2239
372
Containment habitually expresses itself in unitary or monadic forms – self-contained and self-containing,
eschewing external reference and preoccupied self-reflexively with their objectal status. Progressing from
the most abstract to the most concrete of media, although numerous singular cases of sonic containment
have been noted in the present work, we do well to identify three principal techniques through which
minimalist containment is clarified: sustained drones, repetitive continua, and sparse soundscapes. That
sonic containment should be particularly evident in drone music is somewhat paradoxical, as such
composers as La Monte Young, Harold Budd, Pauline Oliveros, Charlemagne Palestine and Rhys
Chatham habitually create works of considerable duration and with gradually undulating structures,
resisting any simple unification by perception. However, in a significant sense, the
musical material of many drone works is significantly self-contained and self-containing. Rhys
Chatham‟s A Crimson Grail – a composition for four hundred electric guitars (Track 48)2241 – exemplifies
the manner in which the force of sheer musical quantity is potentially self-limiting, as elementary music
substance is unfolded in a manner at once strikingly beautiful and apparently contained. Equally
significant are the repetitive continua of such composers as Riley and Glass, the miniature forms and
strict predetermination of material in compositions as distinct as Webern‟s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op.
10 and Ligeti‟s Musica Ricercata, and the sparsity of much of Feldman‟s composition, Vertical Thoughts
1 (Track 49)2242 for instance, which, recalling Lucretius and Leibniz, presents the lonely fall of sonic
monads within a severely restricted soundscape.
In prose, the logic of containment is most evident in works which explore the possibility of event- and
content-free narrative. Not only imaginatively difficult to accomplish, but also requiring technical
virtuosity to sustain, convincing examples of such work are scarce. Regarding canonical minimalism, it
might be argued that certain of Raymond Carver‟s most severe narratives approach this condition, but, in
general, more convincing arguments can be made for containment in the elliptical repetitions of Gertrude
Stein‟s writing, the relentlessness of Robbe-Grillet‟s descriptivism and its subsequent incorporation of
self-generative techniques, and, in particular in the later prose of Samuel Beckett, to which the discussion
will return. Most conspicuous amongst literary approaches to containment, however, are those selfreflexive and ostensibly autonomous poems in the calligrammatic tradition of Apollinaire, and the
ideogrammatic mould of the Noigrandes poets and their early Concrete associates. In particular we might
2241
2242
Rhys Chatham, A Crimson Grail. Table of Elements, 2007.
Morton Feldman, Vertical Thoughts 1, 1963.
373
consider two remarkable works – Emmett Williams‟ “like attracts like” (Figure 104),2243 and Frans
Vanderlinde‟s “Elimination/Incarnation” (Figure 105).2244
Figure 104: Emmett Williams, like attracts like, 1958.
Figure 105: Frans Vanderlinde,Elimination/Incarnation.
Date unspecified.
Theses masterpieces of autopoietic concretism at once prescribe and execute their poietic taking-place. In
Williams‟ work the word attracts is centred in each of thirteen lines, flanked by two identical, equidistant
words – like – which, following the semantic stipulation of the poem, start fairly far from one another and
move closer together with each new line, until the three words are completely overlaid, the likes
occupying the same space as the word attracts. Here self-prescriptive containment – at a concrete level,
like does attract like, encapsulating the work of the poem – and subtle semantic subversion complement
one another. For Williams‟ poem presents a reversal of the commonplace opposites attract, a semantic
2243
Emmett Williams, “like attracts like,” ACP, 314.
Frans Vanderlinde, “Elimination/Incarnation,” CRAC, 77.
2244
374
distortion which owes in part to typographical convenience,2245 and in part to the concrete intuition that,
by subverting conventional meaning, the poem is able better to reinforce its autopoietic substance and to
contain its productive capacity.
The conceptual precursor to this logic of concrete containment is arguably the fragment as conceived by
the poet-philosophers of Jena – that experimental form which, “like a miniature work of art, has to be
entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself.”2246 Yet, despite this strong claim,
it is apparent that the fragment – existing in a state of “essential incompletion,”2247 “forever...becoming
and never...perfected,”2248 and fluctuating between creation and destruction, reduction and elaboration,
contraction and expansion – moves uncomfortably through a referential world upon which, in one sense,
it is clearly dependent, yet in its compactness and self-sufficiency, it simultaneously eschews. Is this not
precisely the poietic dynamic at play in Vanderlinde‟s “Elimination/Incarnation”? Here, however, the
poem‟s semantic element engages explicitly with poietic activity itself. Directly confronting the
relationship between negation and sublation which grounds the Hegelian dialectic, the poem‟s
containment within a single system of elimination and incarnation, destruction and creation, appears to
pivot on the increasing definition and isolation of a quasi-subject – the I – typographically and
symbolically situated at the heart of the poem. The sole remnant of the progressive disintegration of the
word elimination, this quasi-subject is also the pivot upon which the poietically reconstitutive incarnation
is set in motion. A powerful minimalism, the work fixes, through a rapid and markedly tense poietic
containment, the complicity of form, formation, language and letter. The quasi-subject marks both the
spectrality of the poet as productive agent and the emergence of a constructive spectator in the manner
which Foster emphasizes as of minimalism‟s most consistent features.2249
In this sense, minimalist containment rests on the degree to which its impassivity is able to compel the
beholder to affirm its separateness as object, in which case the spectator is in a significant sense
displaced, indeed transumed, to the centre of the container, as it were – to the heart of the poietic process
itself.2250 Indeed, such a minimalism of containment is strongly in evidence in the tradition of
monochromatic painting which simultaneous captivates and resists. In this regard, we do well to compare
2245
The word like has four letters which, when doubled, equal the number of letters of the word attracts, so that the
words may be perfectly spatially overlaid by the end of the poem, whereas this would obviously not be the case had
the Williams used the word opposite.
2246
Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragment 206,” 251.
2247
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 42.
2248
Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragment 116,” German Aesthetics, 249.
2249
Foster, Return, 47, 50.
2250
The Michael Fried of “Art and Objecthood” would find this suggestion abhorrent.
375
the mesmeric quality of Klein‟s IKB paintings, the unremitting intensity of Reinhardt‟s black canvases,
the manifest effort contained in the thickness of Ryman‟s white paintings, and the monochromes of Baer,
framed as they are by thick, black, painted edges (Figure 106).2251
Figure 106: Jo Baer, Stations of the Spectrum (Primary), 1967-9.
A similar ambivalence is evidenced in much of Brice Marden‟s monochromatic work, in which the artist
confronts the very radical structure of his materials2252 to create “thickly worked, opaque surface[s] of oil
colour mixed in a medium of wax and turpentine.”2253 By the sense of their “presence,” what initially
appear to be uniform surfaces reveal an opaque density2254 – a “compressed weighty feel”2255 and
physicality2256 which simultaneously draw the spectator towards their apparent depth, yet repel this
advance by the impenetrability of their waxen “epidermis.”2257 The capacity of paintings such as those
from Grove Group II (Figure 107)2258 to captivate while resisting the viewer is achieved by applying layer
upon layer of Marden‟s characteristic matte admixture, “as thick as butter”2259 – a process closely linked
2251
Jo Baer, Stations of the Spectrum, 1967-9. Tate, London.
Marden uses principally oil and wax, and charcoal and wax admixtures for his monochromatic work.
2253
Stephen Bann, “Brice Marden: From the Material to be Immaterial,” Brice Marden: Paintings and Drawings
and Prints 1975-80 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1981), 7. “When applying colour to the canvas, I mix
standard artist‟s oil colour (paint) with a medium of wax and turpentine” (Brice Marden, “Selected statements, notes
and interviews,” Paintings, 54.).
2254
See Marden, “Selected statements,” 55; Strickland, Minimalism, 27; Colpitt, Minimal Art, 24; Meyer,
Minimalism, 31; Roberta Smith, “Brice Marden,” Paintings, 46.
2255
Ibid.
2256
Strickland, Minimalism, 78.
2257
Mario Codognato, “A Cut Through the Frieze of Time,” Brice Marden: Works on Paper: 1964-2001, ed. Mario
Codognato (London: Trolley, 2002), 12; See Smith, “Brice Marden,” 46.
2258
Brice Marden, Grove Group II, 1973. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2259
Meyer, Minimalism, 30.
2252
376
to the manner in which colour2260 acquires a significant materiality of its own, containing rather than
being contained by the work.2261 Marden refers to the manner in which colour holds a visual plane,2262
“„turn[s] back into itself...reveal[s] itself to you while at the same time it evades you.‟”2263
Figure 107: Brice Marden, Grove Group II, 1973.
Marden‟s monochrome drawings (Figure 108)2264 offer an interesting clarification of minimalist
containment. While they share the opacity of his painting, they do not resist so much as reflect the efforts
of the viewer. This reflection is as literal as it is metaphorical, for the thick application of its wax-infused
graphite might easily be mistaken for a “primitive mirror...[as] from two feet away you can see a hazy
image of yourself.”2265 This much is clear from the reflection in the image produced below, demonstrating
the manner in which perspective does indeed shape our relationship to minimalist objects and the manner
2260
The subdued hues of Marden‟s early monochromes escape easy chromatic classification. See Colpitt, Minimal
Art, 29; Smith, “Brice Marden,” 46.
2261
On the imbrication of colour and matter, see Bann, “Brice Marden,” 14.
2262
Marden, “Selected statements,” 55-6.
2263
Colpitt, Minimal Art, 29.
2264
Brice Marden, Grove Group (1-5), 1972. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2265
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “From,” Brice Marden: Recent Paintings and Drawings (New York: Pace Gallery,
1978), 6.
377
of their containment2266 – the viewer is crucial, certainly, but also evanescent with respect to the
indifferent persistence of the object. Belonging to a “unique tradition of immanence”2267 – a tradition of
incarnation, to recall Vanderlinde, which ties together the material and the metaphysical – the uniform
measure of Marden‟s work is its sense of presence.2268 Yet presence is guaranteed by containment in this
species of minimalism – and of this we should not lose sight. Marden recognizes the “strict confines”2269
of his work, the manner of their “holistic self-sufficiency,”2270 which at once succeeds in “locking in the
painting and locking out the world.” Yet at the centre of this dynamic of containment, Marden retains a
thoroughly poetic sensibility:2271 “[t]he rectangle, the plane, the structure, the picture are but sounding
boards for the spirit.”2272
Figure 108: Brice Marden, Grove Group (1-5), 1972.
2266
Ibid., 5.
Bann, “Painting,” 11.
2268
Ibid., 8.
2269
Marden, “Selected statements,” 54.
2270
Strickland, Minimalism, 27.
2271
See Bann, “Painting,” 8.
2272
Marden, “Selected statements,” 54.
2267
378
Although Beckett never admits such sentimentality into his work without considerable irony, it is possible
to draw from an image that pervades his later oeuvre,2273 the “[s]epulchral skull,”2274 a powerful
minimalist vision of the stakes of containment2275 – the same sense of strain between interiority and
exteriority, poiesis and negation, persistence and desistence, to which Marden‟s monochromaticism
attends. Indeed, the skull is a theoretical object par excellence – at once the tomb of fading consciousness
and a monstrance of the incarnate imagination; a cipher for the closed spaces in which Beckett‟s prose of
an entire decade2276 is claustrophobically located. According to Davies, these works, which Finney
insightfully identifies as “narrative ideograms,”2277 should be assessed as a cycle,2278 set in motion by “All
Strange Away,” and continued in “Imagination Dead Imagine,” “Ping,” “Lessness,” “The Lost Ones,” and
“For to End Yet Again.”2279
Their principal concern is encapsulated in the opening line of “All Strange Away,” – “Imagination dead
imagine”2280 – a clear paradox upon which the persistence of the imagination is affirmed self-reflexively
in situations in which its disappearance seems imminent. We discover in “Imagination Dead Imagine” a
provocative, minimalist revision of its earlier model. This work tests our capacity to “reconstruct[...]
whole worlds out of minimal fragments.”2281 Here is a prose emaciated and compressed, contained by the
sparsest spatial and temporal coordinates, and which presents the remnants of a world tentatively mimed,
then almost eliminated by the intensity of self-reference which marks Beckett‟s work.2282
This granted, the solidity and specificity of the closed spaces or containers within which these works are
situated is of immense significance. Both “All Strange Away” and “Imagination Dead Imagine” take
2273
Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 530.
Beckett, “For to end,” 246.
2275
On the explicitly minimalist implications of Beckett‟s short prose, see Barbara Trieloff, “„Babel of Silence‟:
Beckett‟s Post-Trilogy Prose Articulated,” Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lance St John
Butler and Robin J. Davis (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), 89; Richard Kearney, “Imagination Wanted: Dead or
Alive,” Samuel Beckett 100 Years: Centenary Essays, ed. Christopher Murray (New Island: RTE, 2006), 113; Brian
Finney, “Assumption to Lessness: Beckett‟s shorter fiction,” Beckett the shape changer, ed. Katherine Worth
(London: Routledge, 1975), 79; Paul Davies, The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination (London and
Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 136.
2276
The closed space works were principally composed in the 1960s and early 1970s, although Beckett‟s
preoccupation with restriction and containment significantly predates this period (see Rubin Rabinovitz, “The Self
Contained: Beckett‟s Fiction in the 1960s,” Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, ed. James
Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1987), 51.
2277
Finney, “Assumption,” 75.
2278
Davies, Ideal Real, 132-3, 137.
2279
Samuel Beckett, “All Strange Away,” CSP, 169.
2280
Ibid.
2281
Kenner, 176.
2282
See Rabinovitz, “Self Contained,” 50.
2274
379
place in enclosures of severely restricted dimensions. The former is “[f]ive foot square, six high, no way
in, none out,”2283 “gradually becoming smaller as memory diminishes”
2284
in the failing coherence of its
narrative. The latter is situated in a miniscule cylinder2285 containing two figures, back to back, immobile,
and imperceptibly alive but for the condensation which would appear were a mirror held to their lips,2286
and the terrifying image of “the left eyes which at incalculable intervals suddenly open wide and gaze in
unblinking exposure long beyond what is humanly possible.”2287 Both are ciphers for the skull, the domeshaped2288 setting of “For to end yet again,” the eighth of Beckett‟s short prose residua,2289 and the
attempts of consciousness to dislocate itself from its encasement in the “dark place”2290of the skull.2291
Indeed, it is interesting that the blinding white light which pervades “All Strange Away,” “Imagination
Dead Imagine,” and “Ping” is replaced here. “The Lost Ones” is dimly lit by an eerie, lifeless, yellow
light – one in which the wandering of two hundred and five bodies in a “flattened cylinder,”2292 “each
searching for its lost one”2293 in this “entropic abode,”2294 periodically promises points of improbable
egress2295 – and by a dark void in “For to end yet again.”
Where external light sources appear dim, brilliant white light seems to have its source in the closed spaces
themselves. Taking light as metonym for consciousness, the ultimate concern of these works is then the
manner in which consciousness is at once limited, and yet rendered substantial, by embodiment. For it is
the struggle of an apparently immaterial consciousness with its material substrate which lends an
autopoietic force to its self-reflexivity, a consistency by which the “[f]luidity pointing to chaos” in
Beckett‟s early work, “is replaced by rigidity enclosing the void.” 2296 The embodied imagination tests
itself against infinity. This much is clear in the post-apocalyptic futurity of “Lessness:” a “[l]ittle body
2283
Beckett, “All Strange Away,” 169.
Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 11.
2285
Beckett, “Imagination,” 184.
2286
Ibid.
2287
Ibid.
2288
Davies, Ideal Real, 158.
2289
On this term see Kearney, “Imagination Wanted,” 113; Finney, “Assumption,” 64.
2290
Beckett, “For to end,” 243.
2291
As Davies notes, “[c]onsciousness alive and imagination dead make an inhospitable home for man, who is still
there on the scene whatever atrophies he may have undergone” (Davies, Ideal Real, 141).
2292
Samuel Beckett, “The Lost Ones,” CSP, 202.
2293
Ibid.
2294
Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 325.
2295
See ibid.; Dermot Moran, “Beckett and Philosophy,” Samuel Beckett 100, 95.
2296
J.E. Dearlove, Accommodating the chaos: Samuel Beckett’s nonrelational art (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1982),
108.
2284
380
little block beating ash grey only upright”2297 – the persistent vertical presence of a person, “face to
endlessness,”2298 in an infinite landscape which is revealed when the container in which this person
existed collapses. Yet, apparently free, and indulging in “a wild imagining the blue celeste of poesy,” 2299
it becomes evident that every action is always frustratingly situated in the imminent future, which,
however close, remains potential only: “[h]e will curse God again,”2300 “[h]e will go on his back face to
the sky,” and he will die.2301 “Figment light never was,” Beckett tells us, and illumination here evokes
only the pathos of a tragic hope – the desistence of persistence in the face of actual infinity.
The unavoidability of our encounter with the Real, and its persistence even in the most minimal
imagining, is the painful price of consciousness in Beckett‟s estimation. As Kearney notes, imagination
has ceased to operate as a human agency, of expression, will and creativity and become instead a
mechanical pulse of repetition...But this entropic decline of imagination into emptiness [is itself
unreliable]...For even as we imagine imagination dead, we still find ourselves caught in the reflexive spiral
2302
of imagining.”
“[A]n inexorable force in life,”2303 imagination is, as Pilling echoes, “less and less a matter of exercising
the will and more and more a matter of waiting for the mercies vouchsafed by inspiration.”2304 Yet,
luminescence in Beckett‟s closed space works is habitually blinding rather than revealing. The quasitranscendence promised by the imagination in such minimalist poietic situations rests of the transumption
of consciousness, the dislocation of consciousness to an atopian exterior2305 from which it might be
possible to view such minimal instantiations of a contained existence objectively. Such externality is also
the concern of the minimal sound of the ping which punctuates the tiny, isolated cubic structure – its
“[w]hite walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen”2306 – of Beckett‟s eponymous
work.2307
2297
Beckett, “Lessness,” 198.
Ibid.
2299
Ibid., 199.
2300
Ibid., 197.
2301
See Ackerley and Gontarski, Faber Companion, 318.
2302
Kearney, “Imagination Wanted,” 115-8.
2303
Davies, Ideal Real, 153.
2304
John Pilling, “Shards of Ends and Odds in Prose: From „Fizzles‟ to „The Lost Ones,‟” On Beckett: Essays and
Criticism, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1986), 175.
2305
On the implicit atopianism of these works see Finney, “Assumption,” 77; Rabinovitz, “Self Contained,” 50, 58.
2306
Samuel Beckett, “Ping,” CSP, 193.
2307
Stylistically, “Ping” offers a fine example of minimalist containment: its words, far from unpatterned, present
the reader with an austere potentiality, with numerous possible permutations of pattern and significance, revealed
2298
381
Lodge draws attention to the dissenting views on whether ping is a noise external or internal to the
discourse.2308 The present contention is that Beckett‟s view necessitates that we comprehend this sound,
and by analogy the question of containment itself, as simultaneously internally and externally produced,
simultaneously autopoietic and the consequence of induction. As a minimalist modality, containment
reveals the threshold of example and exception upon which inclusion and exclusion are necessarily
undecidable. Thus, repeatedly flanking the ping which marks this threshold, we discover that the work is
at once “fixed”2309 and “fixed elsewhere.”2310 The logic is explicitly transumptive and atopian – a
displacement to a non-space in which the minimal but unambiguously poietic essence of the work is
predicated. In this sense, containment is neither final nor static, but rather a poietic modality of
stabilization which discovers its most forceful instantiation through minimalism. Yet, contingent stability
is also the mark of potential change, and it is the imminence in minimalism of internal torsion and
transformatory processes which the present work terms distension.
c) The minimalist logic of distension
Although in terms of its immediately visible qualities the dominant logic of minimalism, with its
emphasis on the predication of unified objects, appears to be that of containment, minimalists are in fact
equally concerned with the exposition and taking-place of process in their work, or, indeed their work qua
process. It is to such process that the logics of distension and distribution attest. Regarding the first of
these, we encounter a means of reflecting upon the constitutive heart of the work in its transformatory
tenor, yet without departing from the work entirely. For such is the wager of poietic distension: a
transumption of poietic essence, prompted from within, by virtue of the reflexive arrangement of parts
and the internal torsion, and hence transformation, of these parts implicit to the processual taking-place of
the work. The transumption is of ordinary spatial location and temporal occurrence, to a processual atopia
which is at once integral to the work, yet always in the process of reflexive re-integration. In this sense,
through various techniques of repetition, addition and subtraction, which nonetheless emphasize in its language a
sense of minimalist objecthood (see Trieloff, “Babel of Silence,” 90).
2308
David Lodge, “Some Ping Understood,” Critical Essay on Samuel Beckett, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy (Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1986), 125.
2309
Beckett, “Ping,” 193.
2310
Ibid.
382
the logic of distension marks the processual field upon which the introspective logic of containment and
the extroverted logic of distribution are mediated.
Central to any analysis of distension is the implicitly temporal understanding and elaboration of process.
Thus, although a distinction is made in what follows between temporal distension and spatial distension,
it should be understood that temporality – indeed, the temporality of the Real as it has been defined and
deployed in the preceding discussion – is the implicit substrate of both. Here McTaggart‟s distinction of
A series, B series and C series in his epochal essay, The Unreality of Time, is instructive.2311 The A series
is marked by relative temporal positions, “from the far past through the near past to the present, and then
from the present to the near future and the far future.”2312 The B series involves a more fluid progress
“from earlier to later.”2313 The C series, by contrast, “is not temporal, for it involves no change, but only
an order.”2314 The present contention is that the ancestral time of Meillassoux offers significant
endorsement of the validity of the A series.
As Meillassoux demonstrates, a reaffirmation of the Real in an age of correlationist doubt requires that we
rehabilitate an understanding of time which is independent of perception, cognition and access. The
strong Absolute figure of the arche-fossil,2315 the proposition and formal proof that there exists no
legitimate refutation of the existence of material prior to its givenness, allows us to situate entities in an
irrefutably solid past, and to regard with equal realness the present and the future. Our concern then shifts
from disputing whether or not time is real or unreal, to the task of identifying the proper time of the Real.
In my view, there exists no impediment to affirming that such a time is identifiable as the temporal A
series, or Meillassoux‟s ancestral time. This does not, however, entirely resolve the apparent disparity
between the indifference of temporal passage, and the manner in which temporal fluctuation and
inconsistency are felt.
The temporal and spatial distension which marks much minimalism, attempts to account for this
phenomenon in aesthetic terms by prompting a reconsideration of ancestral time from the perspective of
the processual object. In short, art which attempts to grasp its own processual taking-place defines what
here is termed distension. More closely still, distension refers to a transumptive, internal torsion – an
2311
J. Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind, New Series, 17.68 (1908): 457-74.
Ibid., 458.
2313
Ibid.
2314
Ibid., 460-1.
2315
AF, 9-10, 16.
2312
383
internal expansion proper to the constitution of the entity in terms of its processual objecthood – which
occurs when an artwork attempts to grasp itself, either in spatial or temporal terms, in the midst of this
process. Distension thus refers to operations internal to the object which manifest by a certain
externalization, but which finally affirm the coherence of the object. In the case of temporal distension,
the poietic work occurs in its transumption to an atopian point at which the entity emerges qua process;
for spatial distension, poeisis is located in a quasi-object which offers itself in spatial terms in the very
midst of its processual taking-place.
Amongst the most significant and radical works of minimalism operate by a logic of distension. Samuel
Beckett‟s “Quad,” for instance, exemplifies the manner in which distension is at once a turn outward and
a return inward; an expression of the manner in which disparate media – geometry, text, movement and
colour – come to be held as one. Equally exemplary is the kinetic weight of effort, still discernible in
many of Richard Serra‟s lead sculptures, the numerous process-oriented concrete poems examined above,
and the generative fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the tropes of which express very precisely an
autopoietic expansion and contraction. However, the most productive unravelling of this processual
aesthetic emerges, unsurprisingly, in the manner in which it exemplifies itself qua process. With respect
to temporal distension, we need look no further than Steve Reich‟s epochal composition Piano Phase,2316
while an especially fascinating model of spatial distension is discovered in the poem machines of Liliane
Lijn.
The Parisian avant-garde of the 1960s offered an environment at once stimulating and receptive of Lijn‟s
experimental endeavours with the atomization and deconstitution of language, and the subsequent
contrapuntal reconstitution of its constituents.2317 Sympathetic experiments were being conducted by the
Beats,2318 Lettrists and Spatialists, and it would be no exaggeration to claim that Lijn‟s poem machines
instantiate a comparably compelling form of kinetic, minimalist concretism, although, curiously, her work
is seldom examined in this light. Of particular interest are the conical structures of the ABC Cone2319 and
Act as Atom.2320 The spinning cone, on account of its tapering surface area, has the unique capacity for
generating the illusion of different rotational speeds. In fact, the axis of a cone rotates at a consistent
2316
Steve Reich, Piano Phase (for two pianos or two marimbas) (London, Universal Edition, 1980). All references
to the score are to this edition.
2317
David Alan Mellor, Liliane Lijn: Works 1959-80 (Coventry: Mead Gallery, 2005), 40, 43-4.
2318
Burroughs openly expressed his admiration for Lijn‟s work and his desire to collaborate with her in constructing
new poem machines.
2319
Liliane Lijn, ABC Cone, 1965. Collection unspecified.
2320
Liliane Lijn, Act as Atom , 1966. Collection unspecified.
384
speed, but, were a vertical line to be drawn from top to bottom, two points upon this line would recur at
different times – more regularly at the apex, and more irregularly at the base.
The result, in the case of ABC Cone (Figure 109; Clip 4), is a significant spatial distension, one which
stresses the integrity of the perceptual and conceptual fields within which the individual integrity of the
letter and its sequential identity are determined.2321 In this work, Lijn has lettered the entire alphabet on
the cone: towards the top we discover the first few letters, in various repetitive patterns reiterated in three
separate but aligned horizontal rows, while at the base the remaining letters are arranged in a continuous
band. As soon as the cone is set in motion, each row takes its own path at a specific pace and intensity,
but also exposes various dynamic relationships between repeated letters and rows.
Figure 109: Liliane Lijn, ABC Cone, 1965.
Figure 110: Liliane Lijn, Act as Atom, 1966.
Lijn‟s is a remarkable minimalism: the elementary units of writing, shape and basic motion generate a
poietic field of considerable force. The transumption effected by the work derives from the interaction of
2321
Mellor, Liliane Lijn, 39-40.
385
real motion and apparent motion, and acts upon the constituent letters of the work, constituting a
distensive medium in which the physicality of letters bleed into a non-linguistic poietic continuum. By
varying the velocity of rotation, letters dematerialize at a typographical level, only to materialize a
particularly stimulating and concrete flux, altering the direction of flow as well as the consistency of our
visual perception. This phenomenon is particularly clear in Lijn‟s transparent cones. Act as Atom (Figure
110; Clip 5), for example, presents from top to bottom in a sucession of carefully angled orbits the words
or phrases, atomation, automation, instead of, action atom, act as atom, followed by three rows of
symbols at the top. These are arranged in such a way that when the cone is in motion, they conform to the
various orbits, ellipses and helixes by which intermolecular forces are usually illustrated . This thoroughly
autopoietic work effects a symbolic distension from the representational field of language to the
presentation force of subatomic particles, and a material distension from simple typography upon
transparent perspex to the dynamic facticity of its poietic taking-place.
The processual experience of distension is amplified further in the temporal paradigm of minimalist
objecthood instantiated by such works as Reich‟s Piano Phase. Much has been written on the
considerable technical accomplishment of this composition. By radically minimal means – melodic
fragments constructed from a consistent flow of eight notes and eighth note rests, and from only a few
pitches – it presents a complex array of effects when its very simple melody, played simultaneously on
two pianos in unison, is gradually shifted out of phase. Piano Phase was the composer‟s first purely
instrumental attempt at phase-shifting or phasing, a process he had discovered in his earlier tape
compositions.2322 Phasing involves the displacement with respect to one another of two or more musical
fragments, initially sounded together, by a process of relative acceleration and/or deceleration. All
phasing combines temporal linearity – the composition begins and ends – with temporal cyclicality. The
latter is clarified in the structural process itself: generally short fragments are played identically by two
voices; one voice accelerates with respect to the other, moving them progressively apart until, at the point
of greatest temporal distance,2323 they once more begin to converge until they have returned to their
original relative positions.2324 Within this overall process, the alternation of “fuzzy transitions”2325 – in
2322
Potter, Four, 167-8; Strickland, Minimalism, 186-7.
Ibid., 184.
2324
This is the case in a fully cyclical process of phasing. See Potter, Four, 184; Paul Epstein, “Pattern Structure and
Process in Steve Reich‟s Piano Phase,” The Musical Quarterly, 72.4 (1986): 495. Structurally, Piano Phase consists
of three full cycles, also called sections. The first and third consist of a single melodic fragment held by both
pianists, while the second consists of two distinct melodies: that of the first pianist reminiscent of the melodic
material of the first cycle, and that of the second foreshadowing the material of the third cycle. A detailed discussion
of the melodic is offered by Epstein (ibid., 495-8; also Potter, Four, 183-5, 187).
2325
Ibid., 180.
2323
386
which voices are out of phase with one another – and contingent stabilities – in which voices are in phase
with one another – produces considerable sonic interest.
Epstein‟s rigorous formal analysis provides significant insight regarding the shift from formal
arrangement to effect.2326 Perceptual ambiguity arises when temporal fluctuation is juxtaposed with
contingent stability; phase shifts or fuzzy transitions with sections of rhythmic coincidence and melodic
stability. That such ambiguity2327 should dominate our experience of Piano Phase is in fact an indicator
that its logic is thoroughly distensive, as the maximally ordered system is plunged into disorder with a
procedural clarity rare even in Reich‟s oeuvre, in which “compositional process and a sounding music
…are one and the same thing,”2328 Indeed, a restless simultaneity of equally plausible temporal
trajectories is evident: a condition of temporal multiplicity in which several possible temporal trajectories
exist with respect to a particular entity or process.
The first of these is the indifferent, ancestral time of the Real which, regardless of the temporal
complexities of perception, simply takes its course – the absolute becoming that Savitt characterizes in
terms of a temporal passage or “ordered occurrence of events.”2329 For Savitt, there is no intrinsic
connection “between this sort of passage and either freedom, spontaneity, and emergence on the one
hand, or determinism, necessity, and reductionism on the other.”2330 Piano Phase, by “always extend[ing]
farther than…can [be] hear[d],”2331 testifies to the manner in which such becoming is at once proper and
indifferent to both entity and perception of the entity: both are merely perturbances upon the
uninterruptable path of the Real with respect to its absolute becoming.
Second, the composition instantiates numerous individual but parallel temporal trajectories, deduced
simultaneously from its fuzzy transitions, the contingent unities established on either side of these
transitions, and the idiosyncratic temporality of every realization or performance of the work, and,
moreover, of the unique experience of every listener. Stoianova‟s claim, that minimalism “generat[es] the
present at each moment...without beginning, multi-directional motion without cause or effect,”2332 gains
2326
Epstein, “Pattern Structure,” 494-502.
Ibid., 497.
2328
Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” Writings on Music: 1965-2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2002), 35.
2329
Steven F. Savitt, “On Absolute Becoming and the Myth of Passage,” Time, Reality and Experience, ed. Craig
Callender (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 160.
2330
Ibid., 165.
2331
Reich, “Gradual Process,” 35.
2332
Ivanka Stoianova, qtd. in Mertens, American , 89.
2327
387
momentum in this light not simply as a response to the inherent multiplicity of the work, but also to
multiplicity in the experience of the listener – the productive subtraction of numerous temporal lines from
the inexhaustible becoming of the Real. Thus might we also account for Mertens‟ identification in
minimalist process music of a conflict between so-called clock time, which he associates with the
dialectic progression of history, and macro-time, which he claims is a “higher level…beyond
history…which has been called now or stasis or eternity.”2333 He concludes that minimalism “attempts to
unite the historical subject with non-historical time”2334 – a provocative analysis, but one which overlooks
that no necessary conflict exists between absolute becoming and multiple temporal strands, since the
latter are simply subtractions from, rather than negations of, the former.
The third temporal exposition of Piano Phase suggests that its cyclicality offers us an alternative temporal
frame to ancestral time. Cyclical time identifies a split between that which is perceived as progressive
change, and that which is perpetually in a process of recurring. In this it appeals to the proposition of
eternal recurrence2335 which Nietzsche develops from the dominant Greco-Roman understanding of a
“circular and continuous”2336 time, and the later Stoic kairos, an “infinite time…at once delimited and
made present.”2337 In this light, the temporal distension of minimalism might be interpreted as a formalist
aspiration for the eternal – a temporality in one sense transcendental, but in another imbued with an
immanent transformative energy. Analysis of Piano Phase habitually leads towards such cyclicality.2338
That the same melodic material is phased against itself in the first and third cycles accounts for the
composition‟s simultaneously symmetrical and cyclical structure. Given a limited amount of melodic
material and a steady pulse, repetition subject to a continuous minimal displacement in relation to itself,
does reveal a distinct cyclicality. A singularity can be structured in such a way that a continuous
displacement of its elements will amount to a return to the original material.
This proposition is significantly close to the remarkable formulation which Derrida offers near the
conclusion of “Ellipsis:” “[t]hree is the first figure of repetition. The last too, for the abyss of
representation always remains dominated by its rhythm, infinitely.”2339 Yet, to my mind, it is unclear
whether or not the self-reference which underpins cyclical progression, either in quantity or quality,
2333
Ibid., 92.
Ibid.
2335
Nietzsche, Reader, 251-2.
2336
Agamben, “Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience,
trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 100.
2337
Ibid., 111.
2338
Mertens, American, 49.
2339
Derrida, “Ellipsis,” 378.
2334
388
constitutes a suitably stable point from which such cyclicality might be deduced outside of the indifferent
progress of ancestral time.2340 Finally, the present wager is that it does not: cyclicality presents a
particularly seductive illusion of identical recurrence, but its repetitions are in fact similar rather than the
same, and finally the assertion of the latter over the former lacks ontological force.
Only when these three temporal trajectories – of ancestral, parallel and cyclical time – are traced
simultaneously does the full significance of temporal distension become apparent – as a principal
modality of Piano Phase specifically, but also as the temporal distensive logic which moves through
much process-oriented minimalism as an internal displacement. In brief, for minimalist processual
objecthood to be knowable as such, the indifferent passage of ancestral time must be shown to exist in an
intimate dialectic relation to multiple and cyclical times, which measure themselves against the Real, of
which ancestrality is the guarantor. While such restless simultaneity is certainly sublime from the
perspective of perception – a play of oppositions prompted aesthetically, between form and formlessness,
pleasure and pain, control and powerlessness which is quite evident in Piano Phase2341 – we understand
distension best by a late excursus through Agamben‟s analysis of potentiality.
Agamben proceeds, through a close examination of Aristotle,2342 to suggest that potentiality (that which
can be) cannot simply be cancelled by impotentiality (the potential to not-be). Nor is it sufficient to note
that potentiality always implies impotentiality, and that in moving from what is potential to what is actual,
impotentiality is spent. Rather, Agamben contends that “what is truly potential is…what has exhausted all
its impotentiality in bringing it [impotentiality] wholly into the act as such.”2343 In other words, any act
brings into actuality the potentiality to not-be, which threatens to cancel not only potentiality prior to the
act, but the act itself. However, to the exact degree that in a situation such a cancellation does not occur,
impotentiality also carries tremendous promise. If impotentiality is not exhausted (in the process of
cancellation) it carries anew its constitutive opposite, potentiality.
2340
How many repetitions does it take to present a suitably stable ground in the absence of stable or convincing
point of origin? This is certainly the question addressed by Derrida in Ellipsis , and one which permeates all
repetitive minimalism.
2341
Kant, Judgment, 98.
2342
The exact line cited and commented on is from Aristotle‟s Metaphysics: “A thing is said to be potential if, when
the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential” (Giorgio Agamben, “On
Potentiality,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1999) 183.
2343
Ibid.
389
When an act is still potential, when it has not yet taken place, the potentiality to be is balanced
symmetrically by the potentiality to not-be. However, when potentiality becomes act, the act does not
exhaust impotentiality. Impotentiality does not just disappear, but is carried fully into the act, as the
possibility of the act‟s cessation. But inasmuch as impotentiality enters into activity, so does potentiality,
since as has been noted, they are constitutively bound. That which seemed to have been spent in the act, is
restored, is recharged once more from within the very same act as, in the midst of the act, impotentiality is
converted to potentiality. The charge of potentiality, the charge of a future, is tied to the fact that
impotentiality does not exist merely as the shadow of potentiality, but as a producer of excess potentiality,
or that which carries excess potentiality into the act. Thus, there exists a certain reserve of potentiality that
does not have to be spent in the act, but which is always in excess of the act, oriented towards the future,
and which seems to propel current activity towards future activity. Under conventional conditions,
potentiality might be described as the charge of the future in the present (the being-able-to-become act
situated in the present). Agamben suggests that true potentiality is the charge of the future as the present
(the being-able-to-become act as the present, to the extent that the present is itself an act which
incorporates fully action and impotentiality). In seeming to be spent in the act, potentiality is actually
conserved. The shift is from a static model of dynamics, to a dynamic model of dynamics.
This is also the precise formulation of futurity implicit in the notion of taking-place and of the Real, as
they are offered in the present work. The charge of the future thus resides not in the present but as the
very presentation of the present – its taking-place qua Real. Here the resonance of Lyotard‟s formulation
of the sublime in terms of the interrogative is significant: “Is it happening?...[T]he mark of the question is
„now‟, now like the feeling that nothing might happen: the nothingness now.”2344 Lyotard‟s move from
the indefinite, sublime, suspension – “nothing might happen now” – to the predicative “the nothingness
now,” matches closely the manoeuvre required by Agamben in realizing that impotentiality abandons its
relationship of strict negation to potentiality, and is incorporated into the act. The nothingness now thus
comes to figure for the presentation of impotentiality in the act.
Lyotard suggests that the mark of the event, particularly as it is felt in aesthetic terms, is its sublime
uncertainty – will it happen, will it not? As such, it evades any normal presentation, since it precedes
manifestation. Offered to the senses, taking place as its own uncertainty, there is something of this
offering that remains unpresentable. Here we have a precise, sublime formulation of poietic atopia.
Indeed, we come to understand that the stakes of the minimalist logic of distension are not aesthetic so
2344
Lyotard, Sublime and Avant-Garde, 92.
390
much as they are existential. Distension, in both its spatial and temporal expressions, offers itself as a
positive poietic charge – that things happen and acts take place, but also that “potentiality…survives
actuality [its being consumed in the passage from potential to act], and in this way, gives itself to
itself.”2345 This last phrase is of considerable moment, since it comprehends the very heart of the fact that
what is at stake in the act is, simply put, the very taking place of the future. What Agamben marks in the
act, Lyotard affirms through the sublime question. If Agamben‟s act ultimately presents the ground upon
which potentiality gives itself to itself, securing the future, then, for Lyotard, the sublime question is what
allows the unpresentable (the positivity of the event) to give itself to presentation as negative presentation
– the future guaranteed by the event now. The positions are close to symmetrical. They also reflect the
understanding reached in minimalist aesthetics that, precisely because the poietic act offers itself in the
radical terms it habitually does, that taking-place remains at its centre – a centre which in the truest sense
is atopian and transumptive, marking in material terms that which has not yet materialized; futurity in the
immanence of the present.
d) The minimalist logic of distribution
Minimalism‟s distributive logic defines the clearest examples of the relation between the transumptive
displacement of poietic force and the constructive role of the perceiver in defining the parameters of the
artwork.2346 This logic is subtly at work in most minimalist narrative. Minimal, concrete, linguistic terms
appear to be the telos of a process of progressive reduction, but, in fact, prompt a significant transumptive
redistribution as they are processed. A dynamic intermediary field is generated – one upon which the
work is distributed between concept, language and the most austere representational markers of both. The
distributive dynamic habitually pivots upon the sudden extension or contraction of the linguistic sphere.
This is nowhere clearer than in concretism – an extended discussion of which precedes – and it is no
exaggeration to say that intermedial distribution is so central to the work of such poets as Lax, Williams
and Finlay, that their proper medium can only be described with any accuracy in terms of an
intermedium.
2345
2346
Agamben, “On Potentiality,” 184.
To recall, for many critics this is the most salient mark of minimalism, especially in the visual arts.
391
Steve Reich‟s Different Trains (Track 50)2347 presents a particularly compelling example of minimalism‟s
distributory logic. A composition for tape and string quartet, its melodies are very evidently derived from
carefully chosen and interwoven narrative samples. As Reich reports,
The idea for the pieces comes from my childhood. When I was one year old my parents separated. My
mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I
travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942
accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time I now look back
and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different
2348
trains.
The natural melodic qualities of these vocal samples are intensified as they are transmediated – taken up
by a string quartet, subtly transformed, and woven into the next sample. That the aesthetic substance of
the work should thus be distributed – between voice and instrument, live performance and recording –
locates it very precisely upon an intermedial atopos. Without sacrificing the best of minimalism‟s
attributes, Reich‟s work exhibits the vision of a subtle narrator. At once “documentary and musical
reality,”2349 the imbrication of musical, verbal and visuo-conceptual elements – what Reich describes as a
“theater in the mind”2350 – reflect an art which is integrated to the precise extent that its poietic essence is
also distributed.
However, perhaps the finest example of the minimalist logic of transumption, its manner of exhibiting
itself qua medium and in the very process of mediation, is discovered in the light art of Dan Flavin. What
we gain from Flavin‟s work is an acute understanding of the potential migrancy of the artwork: its
movement between poiesis, creativity, and the possibility or impossibility of creation ex nihilo on the one
hand; and aesthesis, or art‟s expression and perception through physical sensation, on the other. In short,
trying to comprehend the objecthood both explicit and implicit in the light-art of Dan Flavin emphasizes
the atopian location of the minimalist artwork with some force – its migration between the physicality of
location, the insubstantiality of its medium, and the poietic force which some imagine underpins its
emergence. Even a cursory encounter with this work reveals, as Jeffrey Weiss suggests, the continuation
2347
Steve Reich, “America – Before the War,” Different Trains. Nonesuch, 1988.
Steve Reich, “Different Trains,” Writings on Music, 151.
2349
Ibid., 158.
2350
Ibid.
2348
392
of a tradition of both abstraction and transcendentalism, of “the transformation of painting and sculpture
into a third medium that both transgresses and transcends the first two.”2351
This observation regarding transmedial synthesis reveals a radical transgression not only of the
exhibitionary spaces reserved for the conventional media of the visual arts, 2352 but also of art‟s
constitutive media themselves. The proper medium of the work appears to migrate: it is at once the
physical light fixture; the chemical light-producing reaction within the fixture; the light itself, as it
irradiates; and complex boundaries this mediation encounters in terms its environment – the architectural
space, the space of other objects (often including other light-art) and the physicality of the viewer.
2351
Jeffrey Weiss, Preface, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, ed. Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell (New York: Dia Art
Foundation, 2004) 10.
2352
Flavin‟s work is exhibited in five principal ways. The first is his wall-mounted fixtures in which cases the
fittings effectively occupy the space traditionally reserved for painting. The second is the free-standing works, in
which case the fixtures are associable with sculpture. Third, are those fixtures which lean against wall, particularly
corners, which offer a point of conjunction of the pictorial and sculptural (a similar technique can be noted of John
McCracken‟s leaning planks). The fourth means of presentation pays careful attention to the architectural aspects of
the environment. Finally, we might include Flavin‟s large-scale architectural installations which appear intrinsic to
the architecture itself, such as the celebrated installation at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (Dan Flavin,
untitled (to Tracy, to celebrate the love of a lifetime), 1992. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Figure 111)
393
Figure 111: Dan Flavin, untitled (to Tracy, to celebrate the love of a lifetime), 1992.
Addressing the complex of physical, conceptual and perceptual location implicit in the light art of Dan
Flavin goes some way to understanding the manner in which certain objects, by virtue of their
atopianism, draw attention once more to the question of poietic force, now not merely in terms of its
knowability, but in the fullness of its transumptive potential to dislocate in the act of distributive
relocation of its material (the artwork). In this work, a minimalist atopia takes on its most material face.
Far from an instance of pure perception, it is clear in this art that something of formative significance
occurs prior to perception – to furnish the sense with information, but also to account for the distributed
objecthood of the work, which is evident regardless of how the work is apprehended. Tiffany Bell ends an
essay on Flavin‟s art by commenting that “[j]ust as you cannot really delineate the material boundaries of
a Flavin installation, you cannot pinpoint the precise moment of its making. The lights shine in a
continuous present.”2353 Examining this statement in relation to one of Flavin‟s iconic corner pieces,
2353
Tiffany Bell, “Fluorescent Light as Art,” Dan Flavin, 127.
394
untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b 1978 (Figure 112),2354 we encounter an exemplary case of such
distributive minimalism. Attempting to grasp the process of transumptive emergence in the very midst of
its relocation or taking-place qua force, this work allows us to rehearse the fundamental concerns of
atopian objecthood with particular clarity.
Figure 112: Dan Flavin, untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b, 1978.
Flavin‟s work clarifies the manner in which in distributive minimalism, the transumptive process through
which the minimalist object manifests is coherent despite frequent expectation that it ought not to be. A
similar phenomenon is observable in Walter de Maria‟s Lightning Field, in which no adequate
anticipation of the sublime effect of energy distributed by repeated lightning strikes can be offered, either
by concept or by the work‟s physical configuration. Transumption of such work always occurs upon a
threshold – a sequence of occurrences, conceptual points, or physical configurations, able to present a
parataxis of quite distinct processes. Considering Flavin‟s light art, for example, we find a homologically
2354
Dan Flavin, untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b, 1978. Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp.
395
compelling example of distributive transumption as a whole. Such art paradoxically is both produced and
deconstituted by a dissipating energy – the irradiance of light qua medium, the dissipation of which is
precisely what enables its convergence as an aesthetic-poietic form. Finally, might we not recognize here
the meeting of the sublime (the putting-into-form of formlessness) and the procedurally poietic (the
putting-into-form of formation) as defining the work of distributive minimalism.
The distributive immediacy of this work – a position of significant productive paradox – is clarified only
by a close examination of untitled (to the real Dan Hill) itself. Six clear processual elements are
distinguishable: the production of the light fittings; the conceptualization of the work; powering the
situation; the irradiance of the fixtures; the physicality and limitations of the physical environment in
which irradiances occurs; and the perception of the work.
Regarding production, as was the case with many minimalist, Flavin made exclusive use of
premanufactured, commercially produced, fluorescent fixtures for all of his proposals.2355 Thus, Flavin‟s
art is in the first instance conditioned upon a situation of production not directly related to either the
artists or the work: industrial manufacture.2356 Adapting the primary palate of blue, green, pink and
yellow, untitled (to the real Dan Hill) is structurally elementary, consisting of four connected fluorescent
tubes, two facing forward and two facing backward. These premanufactured objects, which Flavin
stressed should retain their union labels,2357 enter what Meyer describes as the “netherworld of
dada…non-referential abstraction,”2358 leaning like forgotten functional light fixtures in the corner of a
gallery space, allowing the work to retain a sense of externality and autonomy within its subsequent
artistic situation. Nonetheless it is clear that some form of conceptual work is underway – a sort of
intervention of the imagination upon such basic materials, a notion which Flavin confirms by executing
draughtsman-like plans of all of his work which were issued as certificates, doubling the proposal in an
important sense,2359 but at the same time pointing to the significant problems which persist regarding the
materiality of the concept, particular as progenitor of rather abstract artwork.
2355
In characteristic resistance to the critical establishment, Flavin insisted on referring to proposals rather than
works (Govan, “Irony and Light,” 71), situations rather than installations (Brydon E. Smith, “Recollections and
Thoughts About Dan Flavin,” Dan Flavin, 138), and expositions rather than exhibitions (Bell, Fluorescent Light,
116).
2356
As noted above, the emphasis on eliminating artistic facture, and on using premanufactured objects, is a
hallmark of the minimalism visual arts (Meyer, MAP, 186).
2357
There are a number of reasons for this instruction, largely legal, or related to the goodwill of workers involved in
the assemblage of proposals or situations within the exhibitionary space.
2358
Ibid., 106.
2359
In this way, Flavin‟s certificates formalize a certain split between conception and execution of the work.
396
Regardless of whether a fluorescent fixture is deployed in the commercial context as a source of
functional lighting, or, through its conceptualization, formation and (retrospectively) perception, as fine
art, such operation requires a very real activation in terms of its powering. Of course, this occurs in the
banal act of switching the fixture on or off, yet this act locates very precisely two sources of power: the
individual will, at once internal and external to the artwork, and the indifferent source of power,
genuinely external to the object. A decision having been made, a predetermined distributory process is set
in motion: sealed tubes of gasses (aragon and mercury) glow when electrified and cause the coated tubing
of the fixtures to fluoresce and give off light of a particular colour or hue which depends on either the
phosphors or pigments which coat the tubes.2360 Through its irradiance, the proposal extends itself
considerably and extremely rapidly. Although certain hues are directed – blue and green forward, yellow
and pink backward – by its very nature radiance exceeds itself, and so these cannot simply be contained.
A principal virtue of light-art is that it takes place at the speed of light, making questions of perception
immediate, emphasizing a certain understanding of sublime, minimalist presence. At the point of
perceiving the artwork qua light, it is possible to say that the distributive character, mediatory parataxis,
and the paradoxically ethereal materialism of the work coincide. However, to validate the transmediation
of the work – from fixture and concept, to power, act and irradiance – the concrete encounter of light with
its physical environment must be recognized as the principal means by which Flavin‟s proposals, quite
literally, take their shape. Flavin‟s work in u-shaped bunkers in Marfa, Texas is exemplary in this respect
(Figure 113-4):2361 what appears at first to be two separate sources of light, have in fact a single source – a
two sided proposal in a u-shaped tunnel, each light of sufficient strength to instantiate the situation in
which a single work is distributed in a plural manner in a specific spatial configuration.
2360
2361
Govan, “Irony and Light,” 59.
Dan Flavin, untitled (Marfa Project), 1996. Chinati Foundation, Marfa.
397
Figure 113: untitled (Marfa Project), 1996.
Figure 114: Installation views of Dan Flavin, untitled (Marfa project), 1996. These offer views are from opposite sides of
the same proposal. .
398
The ultimate form of light art is significantly altered not only by the concrete physical aspects of its
exhibitionary environment – the shape of the gallery, the walls it encounters, the degree to which the
space is enclosed – but also by the existing light situation of this environment. As Meyer notes, “the
actual space of the room could be disrupted and played with,”2362 affirming the work‟s ability to
“transcen[d] the medium upon which it reflects…it does not cover the wall, but exposes it.”2363 The
distribution which marks Flavin‟s work offers an important and difficult extension of the aesthetic and
poietic quantity of the work: the latter insofar as the union of production, conception, illumination and
dissipation encapsulates the distribution of novelty itself; the former to the extent that it is our perception
of these numerous aesthetic properties, our “direct vision,”2364 which finally draws together the
distributive logic of the work.
Yet it would be a significant error to suggest that the minimalist logic of distribution – indeed of any of its
transumptive modalities – necessarily ends with the perceptual or conceptual ordering of space. The
atopia within which is discovered the predication of the minimalist poetic, extends across and beyond any
simple separation of nature, technology or art. Its province, to recall, is the Real: the indifferent takingplace of contingent entities qua their ontological quantity. The exemplarity of minimalism does not,
however, reside in its capacity to produce, or even influence the Real, but rather as a means of reflecting
the sheer consistency of the Real in the face of pure multiplicity. The minimalist object persists, and
through its persistence it clarifies the facticity of the Real. Minimalism offers the aesthetic means with
which to maintain the crucial if often minimal distinction between Being and Void, existence and
inexistence, order and chaos: this is its exemplary vocation.
In this spirit, we look to the far corner of Ian Hamilton Finlay‟s Little Sparta, backed by woodland and
facing the untamed landscape from which its poietic substance has been wrought, to discover Finlay‟s
most iconic work: The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future – Saint-Just (Figure 115).2365 The
poietic and prophetic force of these words – each chiselled on a giant slab of rock, powerful fragments of
a great existential logic, of the conflict of radical and revolutionary logic2366 – confirm the sense that one
has reached both a physical and a poietic threshold. Its medium is massive, brutal, and durable. Yet, these
words are fragments – broken, partial and rendered coherent only by immense force and effort. Theirs is a
2362
MAP, 102.
Ibid. It should be noted that Meyer is referring to a different work from the one presently under consideration,
and so my following statements in this regard should be viewed as expansionary and not contradictory.
2364
Baker, Minimalism, 19.
2365
Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future, Saint-Just, 1983. Little Sparta, Dunsyre.
2366
These are, after all, the words of the French Revolutionary and co-architect of the Terror, Saint-Just.
2363
399
minimalism which expresses itself in contingency, and which takes its tentative shape precisely within the
indifferent passage of time – within the Real, the facticity and persistence of which it exemplifies with a
tenacity which strains across every medium, across history, and across thought itself. Minimalism reflects
a profound sense of vulnerability, but also persistence, which inhabits the entire poietic enterprise.
Figure 115: Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future, Saint-Just, 1983.
400
16. BIBLIOGRAPHY
a) Primary Sources
Adams, John. “The people are the heroes now.” Nixon in China. Nonesuch, 1988.
---. Shaker Loops, 1978/1983.
Aldington, Richard. “Pickett.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 57.
Andersen, Eric. I Have Confidence in You, 1965. John Cage, ed. Notations. New York: Something Else, 1969.
Unpaginated.
Andre, Carl. Cedar Piece, 1964. Oeffetliche Kunstammlung, Basel.
---. Fall, 1968. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Anonymous. Amuletic tughra, Iran. Date unspecified.
---. “First Delphic Hymn to Apollo.” Musique de la Grèce Antique. Harmonia Mundi, 1979.
---. Hanuman Calligram, Sanskrit, 19th century. Edition of Ramayana.
---. Massoeretic Text, Hebrew, 14th century. British Museum, London.
Apollinaire, Guillaume. “Horse Calligram.” Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of
Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Ed. Jerome Rothenberg &
Pierre Joris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 119.
---. “Lettre-Océan.” Alcools et Calligrammes. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1991. 220-1.
Aragon, Louis. “Suicide.” Mark A. Pegrum, Challenging Modernity: Dada Between Modern and Postmodern. New
York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000. 265.
Aragon, Louis, George Sadoul, Benjamin Péret, Suzanne Muzard, Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Elsie Péret and
Pierre Unik. “Language Event One,” Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of
Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Ed. Jerome Rothenberg &
Pierre Joris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 472-3.
Art Institute of Chicago. About Clown Torture Series. 20 Novembr 2011.
<http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/146989>.
Azeredo, Ronaldo. “Velocidade,” An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Ed. Emmett Williams. New York: Something
Else, 1967. 12.
Baer, Jo. Stations of the Spectrum, 1967-9. Tate, London.
Barry, Robert. [This work has and continues to be refined since 1969], 1971. 20 November 2011.
<http://www.ubu.com/concept/barry_this.html>.
Beckett, Samuel. “All Strange Away.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York:
Grove, 1995. 169-81.
---. “Fizzle 5.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995. 236-7.
401
---. “Fizzle 8: For to end yet again.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove,
1995. 243-46.
---. “Cascando: A radio piece for music and voice.” The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1990. 295-304.
---. “Company.” Nohow On. New York: Grove, 1996. 1-46.
---. “Endgame.” The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1990. 89-134.
---. “Footfalls.” The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1990. 397-403.
---. “Heard in the Dark I.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995.
247-9.
---. “Ill Seen Ill Said.” Nohow On. New York: Grove, 1996. 47-86.
---. “Imagination Dead Imagine.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove,
1995. 182-5.
---. “Lessness.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995. 197-201.
---. “Not I.” The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1990. 373-83.
---. “Ping.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995.193-196.
---. “Quad.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. London: Faber, 1990. 449-54.
---. “Rockaby.” The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1990. 431-442.
---. “Still 3.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995. 269-70.
---. “Texts for Nothing.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995. 10054.
---. “The Lost Ones.” The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995. 202-23.
---. “The Unnamable.” The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador, 1979. 265-382.
---. “Words and Music: A piece for radio.” The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1990. 285-94.
Bladen, Roland. The X, 1967. Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Death Sentence.” The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays. Trans. Lydia
Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton. Ed. George Quasha. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999. 129-187.
Blonk, Jaap. Zamongi grin, 1998.
Boyce, Martin. Our Love is like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the Birth, 2003/2008. Gallery of Modern Art,
Glasgow.
Breton, Andre. “Object-Poem.” Trans. Michael Benedikt. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California
Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Ed. Jerome
Rothenberg & Pierre Joris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 477.
Brontë, Emily. “Sleep brings no joy to me.” The Poems of Emily Brontë. Ed. Derek Roper and Edward Chitham.
Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 46.
Bryars, Gavin. Cadman Requiem. 1989.
Cage, John. 4’33”. New York: Edition Peters, 1993.
---. “Lecture on Nothing,” Silence: Lectures and writings. London: Calder and Boyars, 1968. 109-27.
---. String Quartet in Four Parts. New York: Henmar Press, 1960.
402
---. “Empty Words,” Empty Words. London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1980. 11-77.
---. Empty Words. Wergo, 1991.
Carver, Raymond. “The bath.” The Stories of Raymond Carver. London: Picador, 1985. 214-20.
---. “Popular Mechanics.” The Stories of Raymond Carver. London: Picador, 1985. 262-3.
Cendrars, Blaise and Sonia Delauney. “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France.” Poems for
the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From
Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 161172.
Chatham, Rhys. A Crimson Grail. Table of Elements, 2007.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Wrapped Coast, 1969.
Costa, Francisco. Dress (for Calvin Klein). Pre-fall, 2011/12.
de Maria, Walter. The Lighining Field, 1971-7. Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico.
de Campos, Augusto. “terremoto.” An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Ed. Emmett Williams. New York: Something
Else, 1967. 49.
de Vaqueiras, Taimbault. “Kalenda Maya.” The Dante Troubadours. Nimbus, 1997.
Didion, Joan. A Book of Common Prayer. London: Penguin, 1979.
---. Play It As It Lays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
Duchamp, Marcel. Fountain, 1917.
Eddy, Don. Private Parking V, 1971. Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City.
Eggers, Dave. “There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself.” How We Are Hungry. London: Penguin,
2005. 201-5.
Electronic Literature Organization. 20 November 2011 < http://www.eliterature.org/>.
El Greco. Saint Francis Praying, 1580-85. Joclyn Art Museum, Omaha.
Eliasson, Olafur. The Weather Project, 2003. Tate Modern, London.
Ensemble Organum. “Domine quinque taelta.” Saint Marcel Mass, Old Roman Chant. Harmonia Mundi, 1992.
Ensemble Organum, “Qui venit ad me non esuriet,” Mozarabic Chant, Cathedral of Toledo. Harmonia Mundi, 1995.
Ernst, Max. The Hundred Headless Woman. New York, George Braziller, 1981.
Feldman, Morton. Vertical Thoughts 1, 1963.
Finlay, Ian Hamilton. Apollo/Saint-Just, 1986. Little Sparta, Dunsyre.
---. Apollon Terroriste, 1988. Little Sparta, Dunsyre.
---. “Arcady.” One Word Poems. Poor Old Tired Horse 25 (1967): 8.
---. Ed. One Word Poems. Poor Old Tired Horse 25 (1967): 1-8.
---. The Garden Temple (To Apollo, His Music, His Missiles, His Muses, 1982. Little Sparta, Dunsyre.
---. The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future, Saint-Just, 1983. Little Sparta, Dunsyre.
Fischerspooner, “Emerge,” #1. Capitol, 2001.
Flavin, Dan. Monument 1 for V. Tatlin, 1964. Dia Art Foundation, New York.
---. the nominalist three (to William of Ockham), 1964. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
403
---. Untitled, 1996. Hamburger Bahnoff, Berlin.
---. untitled (Marfa Project), 1996. Chinati Foundation, Marfa.
---. untitled (to Robert, Joe and Michael), 1975-81. Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton.
---. untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b, 1978. Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp.
---. untitled (to Tracy, to celebrate the love of a lifetime), 1992. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
---. untitled (to Ward Jackson, an old friend and colleague who, when, during Fall, 1957, I finally returned to New
York from Washington, and joined him to work together in this museum, kindly communicated), 1971.
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Gappmayr, Heinz. Untitled. The Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism. Ed. Eugene Wildman. Chicago:
Swallow, 1967. 39.
---. “ver.” An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Ed. Emmett Williams. New York: Something Else, 1967. 112.
Glass, Philip. Contrary Motion, 1974.
---. Einstein on the Beach, 1975.
---. “Floe.” Glassworks. CBS, 1982.
---. “Knee-Play 1.” Einstein on the Beach. Nonesuch, 1993.
---. “Knee-Play 2.” Einstein on the Beach. Nonesuch, 1993.
---. Music in Similar Motion, 1969.
---. Music in Twelve Parts, 1971-4.
---. “Rubric.” Glassworks. CBS, 1982.
---. Strung Out, 1967.
---. Two Pages, 1969.
---. “The Funeral of Amenhotep III (Act I, Scene I), Akhnaten. CBS, 1987.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96, 20 November 2011
<http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/111/index.html>.
Gomringer, Eugen. “silence.” Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology. Ed. Stephen Bann. London: London
Magazine Editions, 1967. 31.
---. wind.” Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology. Ed. Stephen Bann. London: London Magazine Editions,
1967. 37.
Goodman, Alice. “The people are the heroes now.” Libretto. Nixon in China. Music by John Adams. Nonesuch,
1988.
Gorecki, Henryk. Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), 1976.
Greenaway, Peter. A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985.
Gropius, Walter. Bauhaus Dessau, 1924-5. Dessau, Germany.
Hassan, Muhammad. “Surat Al-Fatihah. Holy Qur’an.
Hausmann, Raoul. Poéme banal, 1918
---. K’Perioum, 1918.
Herbert, George. The Altar, 1633.
404
H.D. “Evening.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 63.
Isodore Isou. “Improvisation.” Poemes Lettristes 1944-1999.
Josipovici, Gabriel. The Inventory. London: Michael Joseph, 1968.
Judd, Donald. Chair 84/85, 1991. Chinati Foundation, Marfa.
---. Untitled, 1965. Private collection.
---. Untitled, 1966. Collection unspecified.
---. Untitled, 1970. Morton Neumann Collection, Chicago.
---. Untitled series, 1982-6. Chinati Foundation, Marfa.
Kelly, Ellsworth. Spectrum IV, 1967.
Khlebnikov, Velimir. Incantation by Laughter, 1908-9.
Klein, Yves. IKB 82, 1959. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
---. Monotone Symphony, 1949. http://www.artep.net/kam/symphony.html. 20 November 2011.
---. Anthropométries of the Blue Epoch, 1960.
Kostelanetz, Richard. “Microstories,” Gander Press Review 1 (2008): 93-4.
Kruchenykh, Alexey. Ballad of the Dancer, 1951.
---. zok zok zok. Performance undated.
Lansky, Paul. “Idle Chatter.” More Than Idle Chatter. Bridge, 1994.
Lax, Robert. Another Red Red Blue Poem. New York: Journeyman, 1971.
---. “is.” New Poems 1962/1985. London: Coracle, 1986.13.
---. Red & Blue, 1967. Facsimile of original manuscript.
---. Red Circle Blue Square. New York: Journeyman, 1971.
---. “things into words.” New Poems 1962/1985. London: Coracle, 1986. 42.
---. “word.” New Poems. London: Coracle, 1986. 9.
Le Witt, Sol. 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1978. Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond.
---. HRZL 1, 1990. Private collection, Italy.
---. Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
---. Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD), 1966. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Lijn, Liliane. ABC Cone, 1965. Collection unspecified.
---. Act as Atom, 1966. Collection unspecified.
Lowell, Amy. “In a Garden.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 87.
Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room. Libretto. 20 November 2011 <http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html>.
---. I Am Sitting in a Room. Lovely Music, 1990.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. “A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance.” Trans. Daisy Aldan. Poems for the
Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Finde-Siècle to Negritude. Ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 53-76.
Marden, Brice. Grove Group I, 1972-3. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
---. Grove Group II, 1973. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
405
---. Grove Group (1-5), 1972. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso. “A Landscape Heard.” Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of
Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Ed. Jerome Rothenberg &
Pierre Joris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 210-1.
---. “After the Battle of the Marne, Joffre toured the front by car.” Poems for the Millennium: The University of
California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Ed.
Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 199.
Martin, Agnes. Untitled #9, 1990. Collection unspecified.
---. Untitled #12, 1997. Private collection.
Mayner, Gluckman. Helmut Lang Flagship Parfumerie, 1997. New York.
Mayer, Hansjörg . From fortführungen. An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Ed. Emmett Williams. New York:
Something Else, 1967. 202.
McCaffery, Steve. “From Panopticon.” From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990.
Ed. Douglas Messerli. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1994. 1012-1025.
Mogensen, Paul. Copperopolis, 1966. Collection unspecified.
Monk, Meredith. “Arctic Bar.” Facing North. ECM, 1992.
---. Book of Days, 1985/1990.
---. Dolmen Music, 1979.
Monks of Thami Monastery. “Phyag‟chal-ba.” Tibet: Musiques Sacrées. Ocora, 1987.
Monteverdi, Claudio. “In question lieto.” Orfeo. Erato, 1986.
Morger & Degelo. House (date unspecified). Dornach, Switzerland.
Morris, Robert. Untitled (Battered Cubes), 1966. Originally exhibited Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles.
---. Untitled (L-Beams), 1965-7. Whitney Museum, New York.
---. Untitled (Quarter-Round Mesh), 1967. Panza Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Muhly, Nico. “Archive,” Mothertongue. Bedroom Community, 2008.
---. “Monster,” Mothertongue. Bedroom Community, 2008.
Nauman, Bruce. Clown Torture Series, 1987. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
---. No No, New Museum, 1987. Private Collection.
---. Pete and Repeat/It Was A Dark And Stormy Night. 1987/2004.
---. Raw Materials. 12 October 2004-2 May 2005. Tate Modern, London.
Newman, Barnett. cathedra, 1971. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Nīkuni, Seiichi. “Ame/Rain.” The Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism, Ed. Eugene Wildman. Chicago:
Swallow Press, 1967. 3.
Noland, Kenneth. Turnsole, 1961. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Nyman, Michael. “Time Lapse.” The Essential Michael Nyman Band. Argo, 1992.
Padgett, Ron. “Nothing in That Drawer.” Great Balls of Fire. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1990. 5.
Padgett, Ron. “Haiku.” New and Selected Poems. Boston: David R. Godine, 1995. 6.
406
Page, Tim. Liner notes. Philip Glass. Early Works. Elektra Nonesuch, 1994.
Pärt, Arvo. Miserere. ECM, 1990.
Pennsound, 20 November 2011 < http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/>.
Picabia, Francis. Poéme banal, 1918.
Plastikman, “Psyk,” Artifakts. Novamute, 1998.
Poems That Go. 20 November 2011 < http://poemsthatgo.com/>.
Postel, Dirk Jan. Glass House (date unspecified). Almelo, Netherlands.
Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 95.
Reich, Steve. “Come Out,” Early Works. Nonesuch, 1987.
---. “America – Before the War.” Different Trains. Nonesuch, 1988.
---. Music for 18 Musicians. ECM, 1978.
---. Pendulum Music. London: Universal Edition, 1980.
---. Piano Phase, 1967.
---. Piano Phase (for two pianos or two marimbas). London, Universal Edition, 1980.
---. Tehillim. ECM, 1981.
Reinhardt, Ad. Abstract Painting, 1957. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
---. Abstract Painting, Black (A), 1954-9. Virginia Dwan Collection, New York.
---. Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962. Tate Modern, London.
---. Abstract Painting (Red), 1952. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
---. Collage, 1950. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
---. Number 107, 1950. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
---. Study for a Painting, 1938. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Rietveld, Gerrit. Zig-zag Chair, 1934. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Riley, Terry. In C, 1964.
---. In C. CBS, 1968.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. The Voyeur. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1958.
---. “In the Corridors of the Underground,” Snapshots and Towards A New Novel. Trans. Barbara Wright. London:
Calder and Boyars, 1965. 27-34.
Rothko, Mark. Black on Maroon, 1958.
Saroyan, Aram. “Untitled poster-poem.” An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Ed. Emmett Williams. New York:
Something Else, 1967. 281.
Satie, Erik. Vexations, 1893-5.
Schwitters, Kurt. “Scherzo and Trio.” Ursonate, 1922-32.
Serra, Richard. Splashing, 1968. Temporary work.
Simias of Rhodes, Egg calligram, 3rd century BC, Rhodes.
Smith, Tony. Die, 1962. Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Stein, Gertrude. “Sacred Emily.” Geography and Plays. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999. 178-188.
407
Stella, Frank. Delaware Crossing, 1961. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
---. Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
---. Empress of India, 1965. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
---. Tomlinson Court Park, 1959. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Stern, Marnie. “Steely.” This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It
and That Is That. Kill Rock Starts, 2008.
Tavener, John. “The Ways to Salvation.” Mary of Egypt: An Opera. Collins, 1992.
Terence. “Hecyra.” Musique de la Grèce Antique. Harmonia Mundi, 1979.
Twombly, Cy. Arcadia, 1958. Collection unspecified.
---. Cold Stream, 1966. Collection unspecified.
Ubuweb. 20 November 2011 < http://ubu.com/>.
Vanderlinde, Frans. “Elimination/Incarnation.” The Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism. Ed. Eugene
Wildman. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1967. 76-7.
Vivaldi, Antonio. “Allegro,” Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8/RV 269, 1725.
Williams, Emmett. “like attracts like.” An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Ed. Emmett Williams. New York:
Something Else, 1967. 314.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Mark on the Wall.” The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction. Ed. David Bradshaw.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.
Young, La Monte. The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, 1964 – present.
Young, La Monte. Trio for Strings, 1958.
Zvesdin, Ivan. School 518, 1935. Moscow, Russia.
b) Secondary Sources
Abbot, H. Porter. “Narrative.” Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies. Ed. Lois Oppenheim. Houndmills: Palgrave,
2004. 7-29.
Abrams, Linsey. “A Maximalist Novelist Looks at Some Minimalist Fiction.” Minimalist Fiction. Ed. Kim A.
Herzinger. Spec. issue of Mississippi Review. 40/41 (1985): 24-30.
Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski, The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett. London: Faber, 2006.
Ades, Dawn. Dada and Surrealism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.
---. “Dada and Surrealism.” Concepts of Modern Art. Ed. Nikos Stangos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.
110-37.
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London and New York: Routledge, 1973.
---. “Trying to Understand Endgame.” Notes to Literature, Vol. 1. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York:
Columbia UP, 1991. 241-277.
408
Agamben, Giorgio. “Critique of the Instant and the Continuum.” Infancy and History: The Destruction of
Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 2007. 97-116.
---. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
---. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London and New York: Verso, 2007.
---. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and
London: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
---. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2000.
---. “Movement.” Uni.Nomade. Seminar War and Democracy. Trans. Arianna Bove. 8 March 2005. 20 November 2
2011 <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/movement/>.
---. “On Potentiality.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999. 177-84.
---. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone, 2002.
---. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
---. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2005.
---. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
---. “The Idea of Language.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 39-47.
---. “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 160-74.
---. The Signature of All Things. Trans. Luca D‟Isanto with Kevin Attell. New York: Zone, 2009.
---. What is a Paradigm?: A Lecture by Giorgio Agamben. August 2008. 20 November 2011
<http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-what-is-a-paradigm-2002.html>.
Alexander, Karen. Minimalism in Twentieth Century American Writing. Diss. University College London, 2005.
Anonymous. Statutes of the Carthusian Order. 20 September 2011 <http://www.chartreux.org/en/frame.html>.
Apollinaire, Guillaume. “Cubism Differs.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and
London: U of Nebraska P, 2001. 124.
Aquinas, Thomas. Selected Philosophical Writings. Trans. Timothy McDermott. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin, 1998.
---. Poetics. Trans. John Warrington. London: J. M. Dent, 1963.
Arp, Jean (Hans). “Concrete Art.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: U of
Nebraska P, 2001. 524-5.
Aronson, Jerold L., Rom Harré and Eileen Cornell Way. Realism Rescued: How Scientific Progress is Possible.
Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, Open Court, 1995.
Attridge, Derek. “Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature.” Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature. Ed.
Derek Attridge. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 1-29.
---. Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
409
---. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London and New York: Continuum, 2005.
---. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: State U
of New York P, 2006.
---. Destruction, Negation, Subtraction: on Pier Paolo Passolini, Graduate Seminar, Art Center College of Design in
Pasadena. 20 November 2011 <http://www.lacan.com/badpas.htm>.
---. “Eight Theses on the Universal.” Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano.
London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 145-54.
---. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.
---. “Existence and Death.” Trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano. Discourse. 24.1 (2002): 63-73.
---. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
---. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London and New York: Continuum, 2009.
---. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999.
---. “Notes Toward a Thinking of Appearance.” Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto
Toscano. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 182-93.
---. Number and Numbers. Trans. Robin Mackay. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.
---. “Platonism and Mathematical Ontology.” Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto
Toscano. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 51-60.
---. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
---. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2011.
---. The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
---. “The Event as Trans-Being.” Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London:
Continuum, 2006. 99-104.
---. “The Question of Being Today.” Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano.
London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 41-50.
---. “The Subject of Art.” Transcribed Lydia Kerr. The Symptom. 20 November 2011
<http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/? page_id=1616>.
---. “Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable.” Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano.
London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 121-36.
Badiou, Alain with Bruno Bosteels. “Can Change Be Thought: A Dialogue with Alain Badiou.” Alain Badiou:
Philosophy and Its Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. 237-61.
Baker, Kenneth. Minimalism: Art of Circumstance. New York: Abbeville, 1988.
Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronoto: U of Toronto P, 2002.
Bann, Stephen. “A Poetics of Transumption,” Cosmopoetics, St. John‟s College, Durham University, 8 September
2010.
---. “Brice Marden: From the Material to be Immaterial.” Brice Marden: Paintings and Drawings and Prints 197580. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1981. 6-14.
410
---. “Concrete Poetry and the Recent Work of Robert Lax.” Voyages 2.1&2 (1968): 80-1.
---. Introduction. Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology. Ed. Stephen Bann. London: London Magazine
Editions, 1967. 7-27.
---. “The Temple,” Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer. London: Reaktion, 1992. 65.
Barker, Jason. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto, 2002.
Bartelanffy, Ludwig von. General Systems Theory. New York: George Braziller, 1968.
Barth, John. “A Few Words About Minimalism.” Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 198494. Boston: Little Brown, 1995. 64-74.
Barthes, Roland. “The Wisdom of Art.” Trans. Annette Lavers. Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977.
New York, Whitney Museum, 1979. Works on Paper, Sculpture. Ed. Harald Szeemann. Munich: PrestelVerlag, 1987. 9-22.
---. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), 79-124.
Bastian, Heiner. “Since It Shouldn‟t Be, Since It Happens.” Cy Twombly: Das Graphische Werk 1953-1984: A
Catalogue Raisonné of the Printed Graphic Work. Ed. Heiner Bastian. New York: New York UP, 1985.
16-26.
Battcock, Gregory. Constructivism and Minimal Art: Some Critical, Theoretical and Aesthetic Correlations.
Diss. New York University, 1979.
---. Introduction. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. 19-36.
---. Introduction. Idea Art. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973. 1-9.
Batchelor, David. Minimalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Science Fiction.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 121-7.
---. “The Precession of Simulacra,” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor:
U
of
Michigan P, 1994. 1-42.
Beer, Gillian. “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism.” Realism and Representation: Essays on the
Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture. Ed. George Levine. Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 1993. 193-213.
Bell, Tiffany. “Fluorescent Light as Art.” Dan Flavin: A Retrospective. Ed. Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell. New
York: Dia Art Foundation, 2004. 109-28.
Bellamy, Joe David. “A Downpour of Literary Republicanism.” Minimalist Fiction. Ed. Kim A. Herzinger. Spec.
Issue of Mississippi Review. 40/41 (1985): 31-9.
Benedict, Saint. The Rule of Saint Benedict. Ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981.
Benedikt, Michael. “Sculpture as Architecture: New York Letter, 1966-67.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed.
Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. 61-91.
Bennington, Geoffrey. Lyotard: Writing the Event. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
Berdini, Paolo. “Similar Emotions/Dissimilar Objects: The Pilkington Paradigm and minimalist and baroque art.”
411
Perceptible Processes: Minimalism and the Baroque. Ed. Clausia Swan. New York: EOS, 1997. 40-51.
Berger, Maurice. Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s. New York: Icon, 1989.
Bergonzi, Barnard. The Situation of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1992.
Bernstein, Charles Willard Bohn, Claus Clüver, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, E.M. de Melo e Castro,
Johanna Drucker, Ana Hatherly, Dick Higgins, Susanne Jorn, Eduardo Kac, Wladimir Kryksinski, Steve
McCaffery, Philadelpho Menezes, Luciano Nanni, Caoi Pagano, Marjorie Perloff, John Picchione, Harry
Polkinhorn, John Solt, Lello Voce, and Eric Vos. “The Yale Symphosymposium on Contemporary Poetics
and Concretism: A World View From the 1990s.” Experimental – Visual – Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry
Since the 1960s. Ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi,
1996. 367-416.
Bhasksar, Roy. Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. London and New York:
Verso, 1989.
Blackburn, Simon. “Metaphysics” (with a section on Time by Robin Le Poidevin). The Blackwell Companion to
Philosophy. Ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 61-89.
Blanchot, Maurice. “A rose is a rose....” The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis and London:
U of Minnesota P, 1993. 339-344.
---. “From Dread to Language.” The Gaze of Orpheus. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981. 3-20.
---. “Literature and the Right to Death.” The Gaze of Orpheus. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981.
21-62.
---. “Sleep, Night.” The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1982. 264-8.
---. “The Essential Solitude.” The Gaze of Orpheus. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981. 63-77.
---. “The Gaze of Orpheus.” The Gaze of Orpheus. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981. 99-104.
Bohn, William. The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.
Bois, Yve-Alain. “Painting: The Task of Mourning.” Painting as a Model. Cambridge, Mass. and London:
MIT,
1990. 229-44.
Bök, Christian. “When Cyborgs Versify.” The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig
Dworkin. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2009. 129-41.
Bonet, Pilar. “Minimalism: A Historical Reflection.” Minimalism, Minimalist. Ed. Sofía Cheviakoff. Köneman:
Cologne, 2006. 24-33.
Bowler, Berjouhi. The word as image. London: Studio Vista, 1970.
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave, 2007.
Brassier, Ray, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism.” Collapse III
(2007): 307-449.
Brumbaugh, Robert S. Plato on the One: The Hypotheses in the Parmenides. New Haven: Yale UP, 1961.
Bruns, Gerald L. “The concepts of art and poetry in Emmanuel Levinas‟ writings,” The Cambridge Companion to
Levinas. Ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 206-33.
412
Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, eds. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism.
Melbourne: re.press, 2011.
Burgess, John P. “Why I am not a Nominalist.” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic. 24:1 (1983): 93-105.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1987.
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916. Oxford: Clarendon,
1994.
Calame, Claude. “The Tragic Choral Group: Dramatic Roles and Social Function.” Trans. Dan Edelstein. A
Companion to Tragedy. Ed. Rebecca Bushnell. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 215-33.
Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2006.
Carman, Taylor. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Carper, Thomas and Derek Attridge. Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry. New York and
London: Routledge, 2003.
Caws, Mary Ann. “Concretism.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London:
U
of
Nebraska P, 2001. 518-9.
---. The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism: Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Eluard and Desnos. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1970.
Chave, Anna C. “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power.” Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts.
Ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris. London: Phaidon, 1992. 25-41.
Cheviakoff, Sofia. “Minimal Art.” Minimalism, Minimalist. Ed. Sofía Cheviakoff. Köneman: Cologne, 2006.
35-114.
Chieregin, Franco. “Freedom and Thought: Stoicism, Skepticism, and Unhappy Consciousness.” The Blackwell
Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Keneth R. Westphal. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 55-71.
Churchland, Paul. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1995.
Clüver, Claus. “Concrete Poetry: Critical Perspectives from the 90s.” Experimental – Visual – Concrete: AvantGarde Poetry Since the 1960s. Ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker. 265-85.
Codognato, Mario. “A Cut Through the Frieze of Time.” Brice Marden: Works on Paper: 1964-2001. Ed. Mario
Codognato. London: Trolley, 2002. 10-19.
Cohen, Richard A. Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Cole, Hugo. Sounds and Signs: Aspects of Musical Notation. London: Oxford UP, 1974.
Colpitt, Frances. Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1990.
Comotti, Giovanni. Music in Greek and Roman Culture. Trans. Rosaria V. Munson. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1989.
Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
---. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Blackwell: Oxford, 1988.
413
---. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Corrigan, John. “Protestantism in the United State of America to the Present Day.” The Blackwell Companion to
Protestantism. Ed. Alistair E. McGrath and Darren C. Marks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 165-180.
Critchley, Simon. Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London and New York: Routledge,
1997.
---. Infinite Demanding: Ethics of resistance, politics of commitment. London: Verso, 2007.
Crowther, Paul. The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
---. Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
Culler, Jonathan. “Introduction: Critical Paradigms.” PMLA. 125.4 (2010): 905-15.
---. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
---. “Resisting Theory.” The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 73-96.
---. “The Literary in Theory.” The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 23-42.
Dachy, Marc. Dada: The Revolt of Art. Trans. Liz Ash. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006.
---. The Dada Movement: 1915-1923. Trans. Michael Taylor. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.
Danto, Arthur C. “Style and Narrative.” Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. 233-48.
---. “The Art World,” Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology. Ed. Peter
Lamarque and Stein Haugon Olsen. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 27-34.
---. “The Art World Revisited: Comedies of Similarities.” Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical
Perspective. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. 33-53.
---. “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.” The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York:
Columbia UP, 1986. 1-21.
---. Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP,
1981.
Dauenhauer, Bernard P. Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1980.
Davies, Paul. “On Resorting to an Ethical Language.” Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel
Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London:
Routledge, 1995. 95-104.
---. The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994.
Dean, Tacita. “A Panegyric.” Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons. Ed. Nicholas Serota. London: Tate, 2008. 3341.
Dearlove, J.E. Accommodating the chaos: Samuel Beckett’s nonrelational art. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1982.
de Beistegui, Miguel. “The Ontological Dispute: Badiou, Heidegger and Deleuze.” Trans. Ray Brassier. Alain
Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. 45-58.
de Duve, Thierry. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Trans.
Dana Polan with the author. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
414
de Man, Paul. “The Resistance to Theory.” The Resistance to Theory. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986. 3-20.
Deguy, Michel. “The Discourse of Exaltation: Contributions to a Re-Reading of Pseudo- Longinus.” Of the
Sublime: Presence in Question. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. 5-24.
Delaunay, Robert. “Simultaneism in Contemporary Modern Art, Painting, Poetry” Manifesto: A Century of Isms.
Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2001. 160-3.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
Deranty, Jean-Philippe. “Witnessing the Inhuman.” The Agamben Effect. Ed. Alison Ross. Spec. issue of South
Atlantic Quarterly. 107.1 (2008): 165-186.
Derrida, Jacques. “Ellipsis.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
371-8.
---. “Mallarmé.” Trans. Christine Roulston. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York and London:
Routledge, 1992. 110-26.
Dicker, Georges. Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Analytic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
Donington, Robert. The Rise of Opera. London and Boston: Faber, 1981.
Diken, Bülent. Nihilism. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
Drucker, Johanna. “Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry: A Note on Historical Context and Basic Concepts.”
Experimental – Visual – Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s. Ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos
and Johanna Drucker. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. 39-61.
---. “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Charles
Bernstein. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 131-161.
Dufrenne, Mikel. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson,
Willis Domingo and Leon Jacobson. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
Durantaye, Leland de la. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.
Eagleton, Terry. The Significance of Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Edwards, Paul. Heidegger’s Confusion. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004.
Eliot, T. S. “Traditional and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1999. 13-22.
Emmerson, Simon. “The Relation of Language to Materials.” The Language of Electroacoustic Music. Ed. Simon
Emmerson. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1986.
Epstein, Paul. “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich‟s Piano Phase.” The Musical Quarterly, 72.4 (1986):
494-502.
Falk, Eugene H. The Poetics of Roman Ingarden. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1981. 114-5.
Fernandez de la Cuesta, Ismael. Liner notes. Mozarabic Chant, Cathedral of Toledo. Harmonia Mundi, 1995.
Ferrara, Alessandro. The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment. New York: Columbia
UP, 2008.
Feyerabend, Paul K. Realism, rationalism and scientific method: Philosophical papers Volume 1. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1981.
415
Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: U of California P,
2005.
Finlay, Ian Hamilton. A Model of Order: Selected Letters On Poetry and Making. Ed. Thomas A. Clark. Glasgow:
WAX366, 2009.
Finlay, Alec. Introduction. Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry, Art and Gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Ed.
Alec Finlay. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1997. xiv-xxii.
Finney, Brian. “Assumption to Lessness: Beckett‟s shorter fiction.” Beckett the shape changer. Ed. Katherine
Worth. London: Routledge, 1975. 63-83.
Flint, F.S. “Imagisme.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 129-130.
Fluck, Winfried. “Surface and Depth: Postmodernism and Neo-Realist Fiction.” Neo-Realism in Contemporary
American Fiction. Ed. Kristiaan Versluys. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992. 65-85.
Fokkema, D.W. and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism,
Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics. London: C. Hurst, 1978.
Folejewski, Zbigniew. Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and
Anthology. Ottowa: U of Ottawa P, 1980.
Forrestall, Alison. “The Church in the Tridentine and Early Modern Eras. The Routledge Companion to the
Christian Church. Ed. Gerard Mannion and Lewis S. Mudge. New York and London: Routledge, 2008.
85-105.
Forster, Michael. “Hegel‟s Dialectical Method.” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Ed. Frederick C. Beiser.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 130-170.
Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass. and London:
MIT, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977.
Folejewski, Zbigniew. Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A
Comparative Study and
Anthology. Ottowa: U of Ottawa P, 1980.
Francis of Assisi, Saint. “The Canticle of Brother Sun.” Francis and Clare: The Complete Works. Trans. Regis J.
Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady. London: SPCK, 1982. 37-9.
---. “The Salutation of the Virtues,” Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius
C. Brady. London: SPCK, 1982. 151-2.
Fraser, G. S. The Modern Writer and His World. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968. 116-147.
---. “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella.” Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago and
London: Chicago UP, 1998. 213-68.
Friedman, Martin. “Construction Sights.” Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective. Ed. Gary Garrels. New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 2000. 48-59.
416
Fynsk, Christopher. Language and Relation: ...that there is language. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.
Gablik, Suzi. “Minimalism.” Concepts of Modern Art. Ed. Nikos Stangos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York and
London: Continuum, 2004.
Garcia Cela, Carmen. “Hearing in Robbe-Grillet.” Trans. Denise Pessah. Poetics Today 21.2 (2000): 453-5.
Gasché, Rodoplhe. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford, Stanford UP, 2003.
Gillespie, Sam. The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2008.
Giovanni, George di. “Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 20 November 2011
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-jacobi/>.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Frecerro
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965.
---. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins UP, 1975.
Glaser, Bruce. “Questions to Stella and Judd.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. 148-164.
Glass, Philip. Opera on the Beach: Philip Glass on his New World of Music Theatre. London and Boston: Faber,
1988.
Glenberg, Arthur M. “Radical changes in cognitive process due to technology: A jaundiced view.” Cognition
Distributed: How cognitive technology extends our minds. Ed. Itiel E. Dror and Steven Harnad. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008. 71-82.
Goodman, Alice. “Towards Nixon in China. ” Booklet. Nixon in China, Nonesuch, 1988. 11-3.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merill, 1968.
---. “On Starmaking.” Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism. Ed. Peter J. McCormick. Cambridge,
Mass. and London: MIT, 1996.
Govan, Michael. “Irony and Light.” Dan Flavin: A Retrospective. Ed. Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell. New York:
Dia Art Foundation, 2004. 19-107.
Greenberg, Clement. “Recentness of Sculpture.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. 180-186.
Hallet, Cynthia Whitney, Minimalism and the Short Story – Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison.
Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999.
Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2003.
---. Introduction. Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward. London and
New York: Continuum, 2004.
Hanna, Robert. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
Harari Josué V. and David F. Bell, “Introduction: Journal àplusieurs voies.” Hermes: Literature, Science,
Philosophy. By Michel Serres. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. ix-xl.
Harman, Graham. Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court,
2002.
417
Haskell, Barbara. Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance 1958-1964. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1984.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1973.
---. “What is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings: Nine Essays, plus, the Introduction of Being and Time.” Ed. and trans.
David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1978. 91-112.
Herzinger, Kim A. “Introduction: On The New Fiction.” Minimalist Fiction. Ed Kim A. Herzinger. Spec. issue of
Mississippi Review. 40/41 (1985): 7-22.
Higgins, Dick. “Points Towards a Taxonomy of Sound Poetry.” Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia.
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. 40-52.
Hilfer, Tony. American Fiction Since 1940. London: Longman, 1992.
Hill, Leslie. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund
Jephcott and ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
Hughes, Glenn. Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1960.
Hulme, T.E. “Bergson‟s Theory of Art.” Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. Ed.
Herbert Read. London: Routledge, 1936. 143-169.
---. “Intensive Manifolds.” Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Herbert Read.London:
Routledge, 1936. 173-214.
---. “Romanticism and Classicism.” Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Herbert
Read. London: Routledge, 1936. 111-40.
Hunt, John Dixon. Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay. London: Reaktion, 2008.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book:
General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York and London: Metheun, 1984.
Hutchens, Benjamin C. Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT, 1995.
Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
Iser, Wolfgang. How To Do Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Isou, Isidore. “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and
London: U of Nebraska P, 2001. 545-6.
Jolley, Nicholas. Leibniz. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
---. “Leibniz: truth, knowledge and metaphysics.” Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. IV: The Renaissance and
Seventeenth Century Rationalism. Ed. G.H.R. Parkinson. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 353-88.
Jones, Peter. “Introduction.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 13-43.
Joselit, David. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT, 1998.
418
Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959-1975. Halifax and New York: Nova Scotia School of
Art and Design, 1975. 181-9.
---. “Young Artists at the Fair and at Lincoln Centre,” Complete Writings 1959-1975. Halifax and New York: Nova
Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975. 130-1.
Judd, F.F. Electronic Music and Musique Concrete. London: Neville Spearman, 1961.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
---. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.
Kearney, Richard. “Imagination Wanted: Dead or Alive.” Samuel Beckett 100 Years: Centenary
Essays. Ed. Christopher Murray. New Island: RTE, 2006. 111-121.
Kelly, Thomas Forrest. Liner notes, Chant of the Cathedral of Benevento: Holy Week and Easter. Harmonia Mundi,
1993.
Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London: Fontana, 1961.
Kermode, Frank and Christopher Norris. “Music, Religion and Art After Theory.” Life. After. Theory. Ed. Michael
Payne and John Schad. London and New York: Continuum, 2003. 115-32.
Khlebnikov, Velimir and Alexey Kruchenykh. “The Letter as Such.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann
Caws. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2001. 236-7.
---. “The Words as Such.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska
P, 2001. 237-8.
Knapp, Steven and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 723-742.
Krauss, Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking, 1977.
LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London and New York: Continuum, 2008.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Trans. and ed. Christopher Fynsk. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1998.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German
Romanticism. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.
Lailach, Michael. Land Art. Bonn: Taschen, 2007.
Lambeth, David C. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
LaPorte, Joseph. “Rigid Designator.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 20 September 2011.
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rigid-designators/#NamOrdDesIdeSta>.
Larsen, Susan C. “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper 1954-1976.” Cy Twombly: Works on Paper 1954-1976: Newport
Harbor Art Museum. Newport Beach: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1981. 16-50.
Lasch, Christopher. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. London: Picador, 1984.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Lavender, William. “Disappearance of Theory, Appearance of Praxis: Ron Silliman, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
and the Essay.”‟ Poetics Today 17.2 (1996): 181-202.
Lawrence, Amy. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Lawson, Hilary. Closure: A Story of Everything. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
419
Leach, David. “Parallel Methods in Writing and Visual Arts.” Generative Literature and Generative Art: New
Essays. Ed. David Leach. Fredericton: York P, 1983. 11-6.
Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude. “From.” Brice Marden: Recent Paintings and Drawings. New York: Pace Gallery,
1978. 3-7.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1988.
---. Is It Righteous To Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
---. “Reality and Its Shadow.” Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1987. 1-13.
---. Time and the Other [and additional essays]. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987.
---. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
Lippard, Lucy R. Ad Reinhardt. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981.
Livingston, Paisley. “Why Realism Matters: Literary Knowledge and the Philosophy of Science.” Realism and
Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture. Ed.
George Levine. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993. 134-154.
Llewylyn, John. Emmanuel Levinas: The genealogy of ethics. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Lodge, David. “Some Ping Understood.” Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett. Ed. Patrick A. McCarthy. Boston: G.K.
Hall, 1986. 119-27.
Losee, John. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
Lucie-Smith, Edward. Movements in Art since 1945. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.
Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Trans. Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Trans. John and Necke Mander. London: Merlin, 1963.
Luneau, Georges. Liner notes. Trans. J. Bennett. Tibet: Musiques Sacrées. Ocora, 1987.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question What Is Postmodernism?” Trans. Régis Durand. The Postmodern
Condition. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984). 71-82.
---. Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, trans. Ian McLeod. Venice, CA: Lapis, 1990.
---. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.
---. “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable.” The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. 119-128.
---. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
---. “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde.” The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. 89-107.
Madarasz, Norman. Introduction. Manfiesto for Philsophy. By Alain Badiou. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany:
State U of New York P, 1999. 1-23.
Marden, Brice. “Selected statements, notes and interviews.” Brice Marden: Paintings and Drawings and Prints
1975-80. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1981. 54-7.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” Manifesto: A Century
of Isms. Ed. Mary
420
Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2001. 185-189.
Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra. “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre.” Manifesto: A
Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2001. 191-196.
Martin, Agnes. Interview with Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama. November 2007.
Marzona, Daniel. Minimal Art. Ed. Ute Grosenick. Köln: Taschen, 2004.
Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human
Understanding. Boston and London: New Science Library, 1987.
Maude, Ulrika. Beckett, Technology and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
McCaffery, Steve. Sound Poetry – A Survey. 20 November 2011 <http://www.ubu.com/papers/mccaffery.html>.
McDermott, James Dishon. Austere Style in Twentieth Century Literature: Literary Minimalism. Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen, 2006.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.
McInerny, Ralph. “Saint Thomas Aquinas.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 20 November 2011
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/>.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall and
Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
McTaggart, J. Ellis. “The Unreality of Time.” Mind, New Series, 17.68 (1908): 457-74.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. London and
New York: Continuum, 2008.
Mellor, David Alan. Liliane Lijn: Works 1959-80. Coventry: Mead Gallery, 2005.
Melville, Stephen. “What Was Postminimalism?” Art and Thought. Ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen. Oxford
and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 156-73.
Menezes, Philadelpho. “Intersign Poetry: Visual and Sound Poetics in the Technologizing of Culture.” Experimental
– Visual – Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s. Ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna
Drucker. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. 259-262.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Indirect Language and the Voice of Silence.” Phenomenology, Language and Sociology:
Selected Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ed. John O‟Neill. London: Heinemann, 1974. 38-83.
---. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
Mertens, Wim. American Minimalist Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Trans. J.
Hautekiet. London: Kahn & Averill, 1983.
Merton, Thomas and Robert Lax. “A Catch of Anti-Letters.” Voyages: A National Literary Magazine II.I-II (1968):
44- 56.
Meyer, James. Minimalism. London and New York: Phaedon, 2000.
---. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP,
2004.
Mills, Catherine. The Philosophy of Agamben. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008.
421
Monk, Meredith. “From Liner for Facing North Album, 1992.” Meredith Monk. Ed. Deborah Jowitt. Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 167-8.
---. “Mission Statement, 1983, Revised 1996.” Meredith Monk. Ed. Deborah Jowitt. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1997. 17.
Montag, Warren. “What is at Stake in the Debate on Postmodernism?” Postmodernism and its Discontents:
Theories, Practices. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London and New York: Verso, 1988. 88-103.
Moran, Dermot. “Beckett and Philosophy.” Samuel Beckett 100 Years: Centenary Essays. Ed. Christopher Murray.
New Island: RTE, 2006. 93-110.
Morley, Simon. Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
Morrissette, Bruce. “Generative Techniques in Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou,” Generative Literature and Generative
Art: New Essays. Ed. David Leach. Fredericton: York P, 1983. 11-6.
Morris, Pam. Realism. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Morris, Robert. “Notes on Sculpture.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968. 222-35.
Motte, Warren, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.
Muhly, Nico. E-mail and recorded interview. 12-22 November 2012.
Newton-Smith, W. H. The Rationality of Science. London and New York: Routledge, 1981.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. A Nietzsche Reader. Trans. R. J. Hollindale. Oxford: Penguin, 1977.
---. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. Ronald Spears. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Niiniluoto, Iikka. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Noal, Robert and Gürol Irzik. Philosophy, Science, Education and Culture. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.
Nochlin, Linda. Realism. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1971.
Norris, Christopher. Badiou’s Being and Event. London and New York: Continuum, 2009.
---. New idols of the cave: On the limits of anti-realism. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1997.
---. “Reply to Jeff Malpas: On Truth, Realism, Changing one's Mind about Davidson (not Heidegger), and Related
Topics.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies. 12.3 (2004): 357-374.
---. Re-Thinking the Cogito: Naturalism, Reason and the Venture of Thought. London and New York: Continuum,
2010.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: OUP, 1990.
---. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001.
---. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. New York: Schirmer, 1974.
O‟Grady, Deirdre. The Last Troubadours: Poetic drama in Italian opera 1597-1887. London and New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Overy, Paul. “Vorticism.” Concepts of Modern Art. Ed. Nikos Stangos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.
106-9.
422
Paniagua, Gregorio. Liner notes. Musique de la Grèce Antique. Harmonia Mundi, 1979.
Parkinson, G.H.R. “Philosophy and Logic.” Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Ed. Nicholas Jolley. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005. 199-223.
Parmenides. Fragments. Trans. David Gallop. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984.
Pegrum, Mark. A. Challenging Modernity: Dada Between Modern and Postmodern. New York and Oxford:
Berghahn, 2000.
Pérès, Marcel. Liner notes. Trans. James O. Wootton. Saint Marcel Mass, Old Roman Chant. Harmonia Mundi,
1992.
Perloff, Marjorie. 21st Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
---. Inner Tension/In Attention: Steve McCaffery’s Book Art. 20 September, 2011
<http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/mccaf.html.>
---. “Concrete Prose in the Nineties: Haroldo de Campos‟s Galáxias and After.” Haroldo de Campos: A
Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet. Ed. K. David Jackson. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies,
2005. 139-61.
---. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago and London: U of
Chicago P, 1986.
Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin. “Introduction: The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound.” The Sound of
Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. Chicago and London: U of Chicago
P, 2009. 1-17.
Perloff, Nancy. “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde: A Musicologist‟s Perspective.” The Sound of Poetry/
The Poetry of Sound. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. Chicago and London: U of Chicago
P, 2009. 97-117..
Perreault, John. “Minimal Abstracts.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968. 256-262.
Pilling, John. “Shards of Ends and Odds in Prose: From „Fizzles‟ to „The Lost Ones.‟” On Beckett: Essays and
Criticism. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1986. 169-190.
Pincus-Witten, Robert. Postminimalism into Maximalism: American Art, 1966-86. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1987.
Plato. “Ion.” Trans. Paul Woodruff. Plato Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1997.
---. “Parmenides.” Trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan. Plato Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S.
Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 359-397.
---. “Phaedo.” Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Plato Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 49-100.
---. “Republic.” Trans. G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve. Plato Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S.
Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 971-1223.
Potter, Keith. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000.
423
Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don‟ts By An Imagist.” Imagist Poetry. Ed. Peter Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
130-4.
Priest, Stephen. “Nothingness.” Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings. Ed. Stephen Priest. London and New York:
Routledge, 2001. 135-138.
Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Flamingo,
1985.
Psillos, Stathis. Scientific Realism: How science tracks truth. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Putnam, Hilary. The Many Faces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures. La Salle: Open Court, 1987.
Rabinovitz, Rubin. “The Self Contained: Beckett‟s Fiction in the 1960s.” Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts
for Company. Ed. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1987. 50-64.
Raitt, Jill. “European Reformations of Christian Spirituality (1450-1700).” The Blackwell Companion to Christian
Spirituality. Ed. Arthur Holder. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 122- 138.
Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2007.
Rasch, William. “Injecting Noise into the System: Hermeneutics and the Necessity of Misunderstanding.”
SubStance. 67 (1992): 61-76.
Rasch, William and Cary Wolfe. Introduction. Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 1-32.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1996.
Redfield, Marc. Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.
Reich, Steve. “Different Trains” Writings on Music: 1965-2000. Ed. Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Paul
Hillier. 151-5.
---. “Excerpts from an Interview in Art Forum.” Writings on Music: 1965-2000. Ed. Paul Hiller. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2002. 33.
---.“Music as a Gradual Process.” Writings on Music: 1965-2000. Ed. Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 34-6.
---. “Pendulum Music.” Writings on Music: 1965-2000. Ed. Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 31-2.
--- . “Second Interview with Michael Nyman.” Writings on Music: 1965-2000. Ed. Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2002. 91-6.
Reinhardt, Ad. “Twelve Rules for a New Academy.” Art-as-Art: the selected writing of Ad Reinhardt. Ed. Barbara
Rose. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1975. 203-7.
---. “Writings.” The New Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973. 167-77.
Richardson, Stanley and Jane Alison Hale. “Working Wireless: Beckett‟s Radio Writing.” Samuel Beckett and the
Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media. Ed. Lois Oppenheim. New York and London: Garland,
1999. 269-94.
Ridley, B.K. On Science. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. “A Path for the Future Novel.” Snapshots and Towards a New Novel. Trans. Barbara Wright.
London: Calder and Boyars, 1965. 50-7.
424
---. “From Realism to Reality.” Snapshots and Towards a New Novel. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: Calder
and Boyars, 1965.,153-61.
---. “On Some Outdated Notions.” Snapshots and Towards A New Novel. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: Calder
and Boyars, 1965. 59-74.
Robbins, Bruce. “Modernism and Literary Realism: Response.” Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem
of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture. Ed. George Levine. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,
1993. 225-231.
Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999.
Rorimer, Anne. “Approaches to Servility: Sol LeWitt and his Contemporaries.” Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective.
Ed. Gary Garrels. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2000. 60-71.
Rose, Barbara. “A B C Art.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P. Dutton,
1968. 274-97.
Rosenbaum, S. P. Aspects of Bloomsbury: Studies in Modern English Literary and Intellectual History. London:
MacMillan, 1998.
Rosenberg, Harold. “Object Poems.” Artworks and Packages. New York: Dell, 1969. 75-88.
Roston, Murray. Modernist Patterns in Literature and the Visual Arts. New York: New York UP, 2000.
Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris. Introduction. PPPPPP: Poems, Performance Pieces, Proses, Plays,
Poetics. By Kurt Schwitters. Eds. and trans. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. Philadelphia: Temple UP,
1993. xv-xxxiii.
Roubaud, Jacques. “Prelude: Poetry and Orality.” Trans. Jean-Jacques Poucel. The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of
Sound. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2009. 18-25.
Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
Rye, Jane. Futurism. London: E. P. Dutton, 1973.
Said, Edward W., The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
Sanouillet, Michel. “Dada: A Definition,” Dada Spectrum: The Dialectic of Revolt. Ed. Stephen C. Foster and
Rudolf E. Kuenzli. Madison: Coda, 1979. 15-28.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An essay in phenomenological ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes.
London: Routledge, 1969.
Savitt, Steven F. “On Absolute Becoming and the Myth of Passage.” Time, Reality and
Experience.
Ed.
Craig
Callender. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 153-67.
Schechner, Mark. “American Realisms, American Realities.” Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction. Ed.
Kristiaan Versluys. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992. 27-50.
Schlegel, Friedrich. “Athenaeum Fragment 51.” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Ed. J.M. Bernstein.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 247.
---. “Athenaeum Fragment 116.” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Ed. J.M. Bernstein. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP. 249.
425
---. “Athenaeum Fragment 206.” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Ed. J.M. Bernstein. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP. 251
Schönberger, Elmer. Liner notes, De Materie, Nonesuch, 1996.
Schwartz, K. Robert. Minimalists. London: Phaedon, 1996.
Scobie, Stephen. Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry. Toronto:
U of Toronto P, 1997.
Seay, Albert. Music in the Medieval World. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 1975.
Sellin, Eric. Reflections on the Aesthetics of Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism: A Prosody Beyond Words.
Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1993.
Serres, Michel. Genesis. Trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
Serres, Michel with Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
Shattuck, Roger. “The Mode of Juxtaposition.” About French Poetry from Dada to ‘Tel Quel’: Text and Theory.
Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1974. 19-22.
Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Sheeler, Jessie. Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. London: Francis Lincoln, 2003.
Shields, Christopher. Aristotle. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
Siegel, Marcia B. “Virgin Vessel.” Meredith Monk. Ed. Deborah Jowitt. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1997. 36-9.
Silliman, Ron. “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World.” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Ed.
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. 121-
32.
Sim, Stuart. Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007.
Siȏn, Pwyll ap. The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate,
2007.
Sloane, Mary Cole. The Visual in Metaphysical Poetry. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981.
Smith, Brydon E. “Recollections and Thoughts About Dan Flavin.” Dan Flavin: A Retrospective. Ed. Michael
Govan and Tiffany Bell. New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2004. 131-44.
Smith, Roberta. “Brice Marden.” Brice Marden: Paintings and Drawings and Prints 1975-80. London:
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1981. 45-53.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1964. 1323.
Sörbom, Göran. “The Classical Concept of Mimesis.” A Companion to Art Theory. Ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn
Wilde. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 19-28.
Steiner, Wendy. The Colour of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting.
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1982.
426
Stengers, Isabelle. “Complexity: A Fad?” Power and Invention: Situating Science. Trans. Paul Bains. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1997. 3-20.
Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation,” Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 19091945. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. 21-30.
---. “Poetry and Grammar.” Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945. Ed. Patricia
Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. 125-47.
Sterritt, David. “Notes: Meredith Monk,” Meredith Monk. Ed. Deborah Jowitt. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1997. 106-12.
Stevenson, Diane. “Minimalist Fiction and Critical Doctrine.” Minimalist Fiction. Ed. Kim A. Herzinger. Spec.
issue of Mississippi Review. 40/41 (1985): 83-9.
Stewart, Susan. “Rhyme and Freedom.” The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig
Dworkin. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2009. 29-48.
Stone, Abraham. “Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics.” Martin Heidegger. Ed. Stephen
Mulhall. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. 217-244.
Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.
Szondi, Peter. Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. Trans. Martha Woodmansee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995.
Tallis, Raymond. In Defence of Realism. London: Edward Arnold, 1988.
Thomasson, Amie. “Roman Ingarden,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 20 November 2011
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ingarden/>.
Trieloff, Barbara. “„Babel of Silence‟: Beckett‟s Post-Trilogy Prose Articulated.” Rethinking Beckett: A Collection
of Critical Essays. Ed. Lance St John Butler and Robin J. Davis. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990. 89-104.
Tymnieniecka, Anna-Teresa. “Beyond Ingarden‟s Idealism/Realism Controversy with Husserl - The New
Contextual Phase of Phenomenology.” Ingardenia: A Spectrum of Specialized Studies Establishing the
Field of Research. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1976. 241-418.
van Doesburg, Theo. “Basics of Concrete Painting.” Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln
and London: U of Nebraska P, 2001. 520.
Van Doren, Mark. “Mark Van Doren on Robert Lax.” Voyages: A National Literary Magazine II.I-II (1968): 624.
Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture. Trans. Jon R. Snyder.
Cambridge: Polity, 1988.
Verhoeven, W. M. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Raymond Carver: Or, Much Ado About
Minimalism.” Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism. Ed. Theo D‟haen and Hans Bertens.
Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995. 41-60.
Wagner, Richard. The Art-Work of the Future. Trans. William Ashton Ellis. 20 November 2011
<http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm>.
Wall, Thomas Carl. Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999.
427
Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown: Wesleyan
UP, 2003.
Watten, Barrett. “The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse
and
Text.
Poetics Today 20.4 (1999). 581-627.
Waugh, Patricia. “Introduction: criticism, theory, and anti-theory.” Literary Theory and Criticism:
An
Oxford
Guide. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 1-34.
---. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1984.
---. Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism. London: Edward Arnold, 1992.
Welchman, John C. “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse: Critical Theory and the Dada and Surrealist Word-Image.”
The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image. Ed. Judi Freeman. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT, 1989. 5796.
Weiss, Jeffrey. Preface. Dan Flavin: A Retrospective. Ed. Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell. New York: Dia Art
Foundation, 2004. 10-1.
Wellek, René and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
Weller, Shane. A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (London: Legenda, 2005), 59.
Weitemeier, Hannah. Yves Klein. Köln: Taschen, 2001.
West, M.L. Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
White, Nicholas P. A Brief History of Happiness. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Wilder, Thornton. Introdution. Four in America by Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale UP, 1947. v-xxvii.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. London: Collins, 1967.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London:
Routledge, 2001.
Wollheim, Richard. “Minimal Art.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968. 387-399.
Worth, Katherine. “Words for Music Perhaps,” Samuel Beckett and Music. Ed. Mary Bryden. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1998. 9-20.
Wyschogrod, Edith. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
Wyschogrod, Edith. “The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the Philosophy of Emmanuel
Levinas.” Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature
and Religion. Ed. Adrian T. Peperzak. New York and London, Routledge, 1995. 137-148.
York, Wes. “Form and Process.” Writings on Glass. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz and Robert Fleming.
Berkeley
and
Los Angeles: U of California P, 1997. 60-79.
Zilliacus, Clas. Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and
Television. Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1976.
Zurbrugg, Nicholas. “Towards the End of the Line: Dada and Experimental Poetry Today,” Dada Spectrum: The
Dialectic of Revolt. Ed. Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli. Madison: Coda, 1979. 225-48.